The Lelangir Code Vs. the Aspie Way of Interpreting Anime

Figure A: The Reader Interpreting Meaning, in this case, a possibly feminist critique of a man’s artwork.

This post inspired me to have a response worthy of the great Lelangir’s attention, however his last response to my blogging, criticising my appreciation of a mobile phone game, left me disheartened and feeling lacking in philosophical worth, because he was dealing with much more baffling concepts while I was busy with filler. I will now attempt to piece together a construction of how I interpret meaning in Anime, as a blogger with the condition of Asperger’s Syndrome.

And what a condition it is, when coupled with what most students I know at school have to grapple with, the “post-modern condition”. What the Australian Board of Studies define the post-modern condition as is pretty vague and I have come to doubt the validity of their readings into texts I hate. But what happens when literary theory is applied to texts I like?

Well, it’s hard to say. There’s a difference between analysing for the sake of analysing and bringing something new to how a text is interpreted in an enjoyable way. In “Figure A” which this blog opened with, a lot of meaning can be taken from this unconventional image. How an Asperger’s person views an image is different to somebody who doesn’t have it analyses it, but often we come to similar, yet varying, conclusions to Neurotypicals. So let’s look at “Figure A” again, shall we? It’s not just a pretty picture I chose to bring visual aesthetics, I’m trying to make a point.

Here we have the girls from Love Hina interpreting an artwork by Keitaro while Kitsune sniggers, Naru smiles, and Shinobu is embarrassed. I forget the name of the girl holding the picture (this is because Aspies have trouble remembering names learned from the first viewing of a movie, and take notice of other visual elements which are more striking, like the expression on the blonde girl’s face while holding the picture, pointing at it) but she is pointing at it, and implying that the image is perverted. Note that in some Asian cultures pointing at something is inappropriate because pointing is for showing the way to the toilet. So the blonde girl is clearly criticising the artwork in her own lens. Alternatively, Shinobu’s embarrassment may show a resistant reading to the text, being so shocked that she runs away, leaving it behind.

You might think my reading is rubbish and is entirely invalid, but to do that you would have to prove your point with your own discourse. And Lelangir in his article for THAT explains, in complicated terms, what the author and reader relationship means:

“We are not ever really creating meaning, but rather, we are simply viewing the predominant meaning or extracting a more subtle one.”

Going back to the Keitaro’s Drawing metaphor, the relationship between the author and reader has never been more simply explained by this scene from Love Hina. Keitaro plays the author, and literally, the text is out of his hands into the hands of the readers, who proclaim his work to be that of a naughty sketchbook. How is this meaning projected? Well, their previous perceptions of Keitaro are built by their reading of him as a person (autobiographical reading of the author’s work) but also what meaning the text could imply (textual analysis through the text itself). The text could be read in a number of ways, and not always in the way the author has intended (the girls have labelled him as “naughty”, and so they have come to a conclusion about him as a person from his work that was unintended).

Now Lelangir mentions a lot of new words I didn’t know before. One of my favorites from his article is “Intellectual Fanservice”. This is a paradox in itself, as “fanservice” and “intellectualism” rarely cross paths. Though I do admit, Evangelion does have a generous helping of fanservice of various kinds, whether you notice it or not…

But Lelangir has a remarkably different view about what meaning there is in a text, which is probably why he disagrees with me. Instead of simply going with “this is what it means in my opinion” like I do, and use a suitable metaphor like my Keitaro’s Drawing one, he uses a lot of inaccessable words which make his argument harder to understand, but he does try to break it down.

My Aspie reading got this from his post:

• Big words can be explained into simpler concepts using hyperlinks and Anime metaphors

• Semiotics is a wide scale of classifications, but some things need to be classified into categories exclusive to themselves. This I learnt in Ext. 1 English in which class I have “postmodern” concepts drilled into my head with a power tool.

• I’m really having trouble paying attention to what this man is saying, but some of the concepts I can grasp when he summarises them. Maybe he should try a different approach to a complex idea by making it simpler, much like I do with the fantasy novels I write and illustrate in my spare time.

Lelangir has truly got a good grasp of the concepts he is talking about, and my Aspie approach is a lot more disorganised compared to his, because of the way my brain works. However, his flaw is that sometimes his postings are at the same time groundbreaking and headache making.