Art & Criticism – Page 5

Aiura: the horny slice of moe anime

Published on November 23, 2019Leave a comment

After a hi-energy opening Aiura proper opens with a few lovely landscape shots, but it’s the first look at one of the protagonists that set the mood for the rest of the show:

Aiura: this anime really loves thighs

Horny.

Broadcast in 2013, Aiura is a short length (5:30 minutes) anime series, based on a four panel gag manga, about three high school friends hanging out and having meaningless conversations with each other. Just another slice of moe series, but for its running time. Short as it is, it’s even shorter than its runtime suggests. It has a minute long opening, a minute and a half long ending, another ending halfway through the episode which eats up another twenty seconds or so. In all, there’s only two and a half minutes for the actual show. The quality of those two and a half minutes though… For what’s largely a throwaway anime, this is really well done. The backgrounds are brilliant, the character designs are cute and the animation is very well done.

Aiura: this anime really loves thighs. And butts.

Four panel gag mangas are somewhat difficult to translate to anime, lacking an ongoing plot as they do. When done on autopilot, you just get a series of setup/setup/punch line/reaction jokes where you can almost see the panel borders. You need something to punch it up to make it work in anime. What Aiura brings is horniness. The original manga is significantly less horny than the anime. There’s little room in a four panel, top to bottom, usually cramped gag strip like this for the sort of shot as shown above after all, even had the mangaka been interesting in doing so.

The horny lens through which the anime has adapted Aiura helps keep it interesting. This could all have been static shots of high school girls talking to each other. Instead, we get shots like this, with one of the girls taking off her wet sock, lovely animated. You can see the animator likes their thighs, but the camera doesn’t leer nor do you have any of the bankrupt boob jokes you’d usually see in slice of moe series. All those slightly horny shots keep you interested while the jokes are being told.

Maybe grow a thicker skin?

Published on November 15, 2019Leave a comment

I’m sorry, but I just can’t see what’s so horrible about this statement that it got Sarah Dessen and a whole host of other big Name YA authors to flip their lid so hard:

During her junior year, Brooke Nelson said she fought hard against a Sarah Dessen book being selected.

“She’s fine for teen girls,” the 2017 Northern graduate said. “But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”

Sarah Dessen, who apparantly has a google search alert for herself set up, reacted as follows (the tweet has of course been deleted since):

Authors are real people. We put our heart and soul into the stories we write often because it is literally how we survive in this world. I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good.

Which, you know, I understand. It is hard to see somebody dismiss your work as not college worthy so casually and if that makes you feel bad, you’re free to gripe about it to your friends. But she didn’t. She posted it on her twitter, taken out of context, for a quarter million or so followers. And then other YA authors with equally large followings did the same, some in the name of feminism. Because if something is feminist, it’s gangin up on a college student when you’re a bunch of succesful authors with a large, somewhat fanantical fanbase.

It was an old fashioned form of fisking that all those people , including N. K. Jemisin, which was …disappointing… engaged in. That first sentence “she’s fine for teen girls” was dissected as meaning that Brooke Nelson was dimsissive of teen girls, was unfairly biased to Dessen, a self hating woamn, etc. Insecurity and genuine concern about the place of YA fiction in wider literature led to take after take suggesting she was guilty of rampant misogeny and personally resposnible for all gender inequality everywhere. Earnest explainations of how teenage girls are always dismissed and not taken seriously were used as a cudgel to attack her with and nobody saw the irony of a group of mostly rich, mostly middle aged authors going after a college student for something she was involved with three years ago and had three sentences in a local paper talking about it?

Stop doing this. Stop overreacting to critics or readers disliking your work, stop ego surfing if you can’t handle negative reactions to your work. Stop pretending that somebody disliking you is an attack on all YA authors.

Grow up.

Chelsea Cain shows you how to not handle criticism

Published on June 10, 2019Leave a comment

Eagle Eyed viewers noticed something strange in the latest issue of Chelsea Cain’s Man-Eaters, a dystopian satire about how menstruation turns pubescent women into werepanthers:

First panel from Man-Eaters 9 showing a critical tweet

In case you can’t read that, those are two mildly critical tweets about Man-Eaters hung on the walls of a rehabilitation centre for menstruators. Chelsea Cain breaking the fourth wall there to really own the person who wrote those tweets. (I won’t link to these tweets directly; they are googable if you really want to see them). Note that both of them are from the same person, a reader who didn’t tweet at Chelsea Cain directly, has fewer followers than even I have and only expressed mild disappointment that Man-Eaters wasn’t better than it was. Why feel the need to blow it all up by including them in the issue without approval and hence expose both them and your own inability to handle criticism to a much wider, much more hostile audience? Why do this to yourself?

Second panel from Man-Eaters 9 showing a critical tweet

It’s not as if Cain herself doesn’t know what it feels like to be a target of harassment. On Metafilter last year I posted an interview in which she talked about her own experiences being harassed for being outspoken feminist in her work for Marvel. Sure, she left the poster’s identity off the tweets she put in the comic, but as said, a simple search on that first sentence in the first tweet will find the originals. Fortunately for the original poster, the comix community so far has responded with horror at Cain and they seem to have suffered little consequences so far other than the stress of knowing a big name comic creator tried to sick their fans at you.

Whether the criticism is warranted doesn’t enter into it. The problem is that Chelsea Cain took the same right wing harassment tactics used against her and attempted to silence a critic, one with a much smaller following than she has. Once the backlash against that started this weekend she was quick to apologise and throw a pity party for herself for being so dumb, but she never once contacted the person she actually wronged before she deleted her twitter account. It’s not a good look, but you also have to wonder why her editor, publisher, or even whoever had to cut and paste those tweets into the panels in the first place didn’t drew Cain aside to ask her if she really thought this through? American comics are a cesspit of unprofessionalism but this is low even by their standards.

UPDATE: for those wanting to read a good analysis of what’s wrong with Man-Eaters as a comic and story, including its gender essentialism, may I recommend Véronique Emma Houxbois’ review of the series, written before #9 came out.

Rammstein’s Deutschland looks very French to me

Published on April 12, 2019Leave a comment

I can’t help but look at the video for Deutschland and see Enki Bilal in it.

Enki Bilal and Pierre Christin/Jean-Claude Mézières’ Valerian series, or rather one particular album in that series, Sur les Terres Truquées. The latter because it’s a story set in a series of (faked) important historical moments that ultimately collide together into one big mess at the climax of the story. Not unlike the video with its mosaic of dark scenes from Germany’s shameful past, from Romans slaughtered in the woods of Germania to Rammstein themselves as Jewish prisoners being executed. In the end these too all blend together.

But I was mostly reminded of Enki Bilal. That mix of perverted science, mythology and religion, the fascination with fascism and totalitarianism, the sense of decay and degeneration, it’s all very Bilalesque. Ruby Commey too, as Germania could’ve walked out from one of his stories, beautiful and the focal point of each scene she appears in, but corrupted. There’s a layer of grime in most of Bilal’s settings that you see in the video too, the scene of the monks devouring offal frex. Whether or not the makers were actually inspired by him or not doesn’t really matter, but it sure looks like something Bilal could’ve made.

Making English gender fluid is only difficult to lazy translators

Published on March 20, 2019Leave a comment

This shows a lack of imagination on the part of Toni Pollard:

Clara Ng’s “Meteors” is a deceptively simple tale of a sweet relationship between an alien and an earthling. Set in a distant galaxy, it plays with the dimensions of space and time. However, reading it in Indonesian likely provides a different experience than reading its English translation. This difference is due to another element that the author is consciously toying with—that of gender. The gender fluidity that exists in the Indonesian is almost impossible to translate satisfactorily for English readers.

[…]

For example, in a story I translated a few years ago, “The Lighthouse” by Linda Christanty, it is not until near the end that a relationship that began during a chance meeting on a beach is revealed to be a lesbian relationship—prior to the end, only the main character is identified as “she.” In the English translation, because of the pronoun “she,” this aspect of the story had to be revealed much earlier.

In the end Toni Pollard decides it’s all too difficult and just assigns (rather, makes up) genders for the characters rather than attempt to keep the gender ambiguity or fluidity of the original story. There are always challenges when translating a story, but really keeping the characters gender consistent in translation shouldn’t be one of them. English offers plenty of ways to be gender ambiguous, but the simple singular they is usually sufficient. That this person rejected it over the expressed wishes of the original author, even if the latter according to them was pleased with the end result, speaks of a lack of imagination and too much ego. Even if they themselves couldn’t have found decent alternatives, why not ask gender fluid people for solutions? Plenty of people on e.g. Twitter who’d be eager to help.

On another level it also seems a bit, how to say it, cultural imperialist to smooth out the gender fluidity of the original Indonesian this way? One of the minor things that annoys me about watching anime is when subtitles either straight up ignore things like honorifics and/or try to find English language equivalents for them. In the first case you lose a layer of meaning, in the second you’re trying to force a round peg into a square hole and you get aberrations like translating “onee-sama” as “missy”. In either case the end result is that something distinctively Japanese is lost in translation to adhere to outdated notions of what good English is like. Here too, with this refusal to keep the gender fluidity of the original, something irreplaceable is lost.