Anime – Page 9 – Wis[s]e Words

Incel romance? — Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu

Published on April 2, 2023Leave a comment

Edgelord has murderous fantasies about his class mates, especially about the most popular girl in his class.

The half naked corpse of his classmate with stylised blood flowing out of her while sakura petals flutter by. The subtitle reads: her body belongs to her killer.

And then he discovers she’s a egocentric, clumsy airhead who doesn’t know how to read the room and all his hatred and anger evaporates.

Yamada with chocolate crumbs around her mouth tells that she eats what she wants to eat when she wants it and looks smug about it.

A loser protagonist discovering the class idol’s hidden imperfections is a staple of anime romcoms of course. What’s new is our protagonist being, well, an incel. The heroine having to prove her humanity so that the protagonist doesn’t murder her isn’t as sweet as “she’s actually very shy rather than cool and only he knows it”. It would be horrible to start a romantic comedy this way. Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu‘s setup therefore had me anxious. Luckily it turns out the protagonist, Ichikawa Kyoutarou, is not so much an incel as a chuuni. He has his fantasies but they feel as unrealistic as somebody who’s worried the dragon sealed away in his left hand will awaken. It helps that the anime doesn’t dwell on them.

The impression I got from this first episode was that there was more to Ichikawa’s obsession with Yamada Anna than her status as the prettiest girl in his class. It felt more personal; there were hints at a backstory that might explain it. for a start, he is much too protective of her. Twice this episode he did something self destructive to get her out of an unpleasant situation. You don’t do that for somebody you only started liking because you caught her eating crisps in the school library. He went from would-be killer to protector far too quickly.

We haven’t gotten much insights into Yamada so far. We don’t even know if she’s really the class idol Ichikawa thinks she is. She doesn’t seem to be that different with her friends than when he caught her alone. Has he just built her up in his head to be this amazing cool person? It will be interesting to see what the series will make of this, and some of the small hints that Yamada too had her eye on Ichikawa.

Slapstick is not abuse

Published on March 21, 2023Leave a comment

In a post on whether Bocchi the Rock is mean to Bocchi, Bless hits on something that I’ve been struggling with recently, when people, critics especially, conflate comedic violence with actual abuse:

In a way, it’s the same sort of thing as a tsundere girl punching out her dense love interest. I’ve always been a little baffled by people who claim this kind of cartoonishly exaggerated expression of character promotes abuse in romantic relationships. While I understand people being uncomfortable with it (just as I can understand someone being uncomfortable with Bocchi’s portrayal of social anxiety), I don’t think it makes interpretive sense to treat these kinds of abstractions as the show’s reality. When Chitoge winds up a ball of fire to punch Raku in Nisekoi, that’s obviously not meant to be taken as literally happening. The same effect happens, just to a lesser degree, with a less fantastical punch.

It’s not that you can’t feel uncomfortable watching this or that you cannot disagree with its presence in a show, it’s more that it sometimes feels as if critics believe it is actual abuse happening to the characters rather than a humourous device? Anime Feminist especially has a bad habit of doing this, treating slapstick as abuse like in the comment thread here to the point where it routinely down rates otherwise outstanding, feminist friendly shows in favour of bland nothing burgers. As if inoffensive is more important than being good. With anything even remotely queer being judged that much more harshly. Girls Love shows especially are a victim of this. I like the site, I like its purpose, but this drives me nuts. I wish they would be a bit more charitable.

Why watch something you cannot understand?

Published on February 28, 2023Leave a comment

Speaking of translating, as we were doing last Saturday, here’s an ancient fan rant about the sort of people who watch Very Japanese Anime:

It’s a show about Japanese references and Japanese wordplay. It’s not primarily a life sitcom or a slapstick act or anything “universal” like that. You could and should be watching something else – it’s not like we’re wanting for English sitcoms or sketch programs. If you’re watching it with English subs, or probably with any subs, you’re

Japanese, but interested in how one would translate if one had the time on his hands.

a pun-lover like me, but have made the inexplicable decision to look for your puns wedged forcefully into localizations of Japanese things instead of in one of the many well-crafted and legitimate sources of English puns.

full of shit, watching this because you like anime just for being anime, and because you want to go read a bunch of explanations later and then congratulate yourself/brag about what a smart Japanophile you are and how you definitely totally got all the jokes.

The show they’re talking about is Joshiraku, a 2012 slice of moe comedy series about a group of female rakugo performers. Rakugo is a Japanese storytelling art form with its roots in the Edo period and specialises in telling long, complicated mostly humorous stories, usually set in that period. The performer relies only on their storytelling technique, voicing each character themselves, using a small fan and cloth as props but apart from that relying only on their voice, mime and facial acting. The stories themselves are usually full of wordplay, puns and historical references so often hard to understand for non-Japanese. None of which matters for this series however, as the focus is instead on the four girls interacting with each other while they’re waiting to go on stage, or during the intervals or after having concluded a show. (The closest it comes to actual rakugo is at the start of the ending song. The problem is that their conversations, despite the anime’s emphasis that these are just “ordinary so that viewers can fully enjoy how cute the girls are”, they’re actually stuffed even more full of wordplay, puns and obscure references than the rakugo would’ve been. An impression of the difficulties this makes for translating and subtitling this mess can be found in the translator notes its fansubber left behind.

Nevertheless I did laugh. Even if ninetyfive percent of the jokes and references went over my head, I still laughed. To insist that you have to be either Japanese or fluent in the language enough to recognise the puns seems a bit harsh, as the original poster does acknowledge in their addendum. (A very Yankee mentality on display there, that confusion on why you’d want to watch something foreign instead of something more easily digestible and in English). To be honest, I didn’t go into Joshiraku with more on my mind than that it looked like a cute, funny series with a bit of a reputation of being ‘difficult’. That latter turned out to be exaggerated. Most of it was perfectly understandable even if many individual jokes or sight gags didn’t land for me. (Also a testament to its fansubber’s hard work!)

There’s another sort of pleasure to be had in this sort of dense, hyper layered material, the pleasure of getting to grips with it, seeing the patterns, understanding a certain reference or gag maybe only years or even decades later. Glimpsing a larger world through these half understood allusions. It’s very much the same thing as when I first started to read Marvel comics, similar to finding where an obscure sample in a rap song originally came from. It’s the sort of thing I’m always unconsciously looking out for in my entertainment. A nerdy sort of pleasure seeking, but a sincere one.

New PreCure looks promising

Published on February 5, 2023Leave a comment

Not so much PreCure as ParCure, am I rite?

Last year’s PreCure was a bit of a disappointment for me, the first one since I started watching it seasonally that I did not finish. Neither the theme nor the characters interested me and honestly it was clear from episode one that it wasn’t one of the good PreCures. Not that I’m anywhere near the target audience of course. This year’s entry, Hirogaru Sky Precure, looks a lot more promisingly from the very start. Sora is badass even before she becomes a Precure as that parkour scene shows, not hesitating to put herself on the line for a stranger’s sake. Which means when the villain kidnaps the baby princess of Skyland just as she arrives at the capital, she immediately sets up in pursuit. The villain escapes with his hostage through a weird portal, Sora immediately follows him and rescues the baby, only to find herself, well, here:

A good PreCure series needs a good sense of humour as well being able to handle its action scenes and this was hilarious, a proper Loony Tunes moment. Sora is a great protagonist and her meet cute with Mashiro, literally dropping out of the sky on her, was great too. In most PreCure series Mashiro, the ‘normal’ girl, would be the protagonist, so having the outer worlder Sora be it instead will be interesting. Looking forward to seeing Sora and Mashiro interact in day to day life as well.

Anime Peaked in 2006

Published on January 21, 2023Leave a comment

At least if you look at the number of anime minutes aired on tv per year, as Matteo Watzky explains over at Full Frontal:

This new set of data helps us put the previous one in perspective: while it may seem that 2008 represented a peak because of the amount of new works, it would actually have been 2006, which saw around 20,000 minutes more of animation air on TV. Actually, 2006’s record has not been beaten, even in 2018, which witnessed almost 50 more TV shows on air. The general shift from 2-cour to 1-cour shows may have inflated the overall numbers, but not the actual amount of content being aired.

It feels counterintuitive at first because we seem to be flooded with more and more series each season, but even when looking at the number of anime produced the totals for 2006 (329) and 2022 (346) are not that different. And with series lengths themselves having become shorter, with the 12-13 episode series being the norm now, it is certainly possible that 2006 was anime’s peak.

But I’m still curious about the methology behind these numbers though. The sources used by Watzky are Japanese, the number of anime coming from the Japanese anime database, with the graph of minutes of anime broadcast coming from a study on animator’s experiences, not linked to. Watzky doesn’t discuss how these two sources got their numbers, which is a pity as the original sources will not be accessible for many people, including myself. Methology is important, especially when comparing multiple sources like here. For example, the second source talks about minutes of anime broadcast on television, while the number of anime is for all anime, including shows or movies never broadcast there. Another being what is counted as broadcast on television in the first place: over the air, cable, internet based streaming services and which are counted as such. What counts as a separate anime is up for debate as well of course. Anidb e.g. usually puts specials and bluray extras under their parent series, while MyAnimeList splits everything up.

In other words, there is some room for dobut here that it really is the case anime peaked in number of minutes broadcast back in 2006, or in number of individual anime produced in 2018. I do believe these numbers are roughly correct, even if it doesn’t feel that way. It may just be that we’re just that much more aware of all anime created as almost everything these days gets a release for an English language audience now, being able to watch at the same time as the original audience, which wasn’t the case in 2006. It’ll be interesting to see what the rest of the decade will do.