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.
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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 In either case the end result is that something distinctively Japanese is lost in translation to adhere to outdated notions of what good English is like.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.
The best recent isekai series is about an enlightened Japanese incel who gets reincarnated as a slime in a fantasy world and teaches all the grateful natives how to live in harmony with each other even though they’re different species.
Is this a fantasy of colonialism? Well, it’s not a million miles away from something like Tarzan. As you know Bob, isekai is a rather popular fantasy subgenre, where the protagonist either gets transported from modern day Japan to a fantasy world, or gets reincarnated into it after dying in an accident (usually courtesy of Truck-kun) or something similar. Sometimes they’re summoned, sometimes it’s an accident and if they’re reincarnated, it’s usually as a reward or apology for dying. Sometimes it’s a light hearted power fantasy, where protag-kun defeats all sorts of threats without breaking a sweat while collecting a harem of grateful fantasy girls, sometimes it’s a grim and gritty revenge fantasy where his seemingly thrash power is revealed to be game breaking because of how cleverly he applies it while seeking revenge on those that done him wrong and defeat the evil overlord menacing the world (the harem is still there of course). Sometimes it’s much more innocent; two recent examples where both of restaurants being transported to a fantasy world and teaching the natives about the wonders of Japanese food. But through all of it runs an imperialist, colonialist streak, as this Pause and Select video argues:
Sometimes this is very obvious, as in Gate, which starts with a dimensional, well, gate opening up in Tokyo through which a fantasy army emerges to attack the city. After initial panic the police and Japanese Self Defence Forces rally and defeat it, with an expeditionary force sent to the other side of the gate to prevent a second attack. A series of battles there results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of imperial soldiers for little loss on the Japanese side. Once a base is established, the series follows the protagonist, who also helped foil the initial attack on a series of what are essentially hearts and minds missions. A comparison with the US War on Terror and its continuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is obvious. Especially when it quickly becomes clear Japan would very much like to ‘develop’ the new ‘Special Region’.
But usually it’s a bit more subtle, just the idea of a random Japanese person being better at being a hero than the actual inhabitants of fantasyland. That’s colonialism in a nut shell, familiar from Tarzan and decades of American science fiction. The latter makes for a good comparison. The Campbellian/Heinlein science fiction of the socalled Golden Age was cheerfully imperialistic, manly men conquering the stars and engaging in the occasional bit of genocide to make the universe safe for Anglosaxons. Coming from a country still high on manifest destiny it was no surprise that alien races were there only to be conquered or pitied.
Modern Japanese isekai fantasy isn’t this aggressive in its colonial fantasies, as that Pause and Select video explores. It’s more about ‘soft power’, about Japanese culture being superior to the indigenous cultures of fantasyland, as seen in the two “restaurants trapped in fantasyland” series (Isekai Shokudou & Isekai Nobu) we’ve seen the past two years. In both the Japanese food is so obviously more tasty than the fare the fantasylanders are used to even though both are bog standard restaurants serving bog standard food. The latter series was actually commissioned to promote the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. Cool Japan in Another World. The most blatant example of this Cool Japan imperialism was 2013’s Outbreak Company, where a shut-in otaku is given the task of selling anime culture to a newly discovered secondary world in a government sponsored attempt to ‘conquer’ this world through culture.
Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken, which we started with, is less blatantly otaku pandering and therefore more interesting as an example of soft colonialism. Our protagonist Rimuru is a fairly average isekai protagonist, stabbed to death defending his friends/co-workers from an attack, reincarnated as a slime who has the power to swallow up bigger monsters and copy their power. It’s a classic power fantasy, the meek looking person (or slime) being much more powerful than they look. When he encounters a group of goblins driven from their home by dire wolves, he takes their side, takes out the leader of the wolves and becomes the ruler of both sets of monsters. From that humble beginning he builds up a country where all sorts of monsters can live together in peace under his benevolent dictatorship. It’s a very seductive sort of fantasy and I can’t say I don’t like it, certainly moreso than something like Goblin Slayer, but it remains a colonialist fantasy.
Nothing makes this as clear as the naming scenes. It’s a bit of a fantasy gaming cliche that ordinary monsters are nameless while named monsters are more powerful. And indeed, the low level monster tribes Rimuru encounters are almost entirely nameless, untill he sets out to name them, at a cost to his magic. The results are spectacular, with ordinary goblins becoming super powered and much more human looking. This repeats with every race Rimuru names: the men always become buff slabs of beef while the women gain bouncy bouncy chests, even when they’re lizard people. The unnamed people gain recognition and value only when named by the colonial authorities. Before that, they’re just a mess of small fry.
As an European, this sort of attitude is not new in the stories I’ve consumed, just the way in which this Japanese variant differs from what I’ve read in French comics or seen in American movies. A series like Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken is fairly innocuous in context, if patronising towards fictional species and with an attitude that can be traced back to Japan’s WWII era imperialism. Few of us do better here in the west. It’s not vile like Goblin Slayer or Shield Hero which wallow in resentment, but it does pay to keep the background of its particular narrative in mind. It’s not necessarily bad to watch this sort of series, as long as you acknowledge its less savoury aspects.
How we’re watching anime when we’re watching anime.
So the point made is that when you watch television in your own language, you can get away with not paying a hundred percent attention to it. A lot of television is watched while you’re doing something else after all, like the way we used to listen to the radio. Maybe you’re doing the dishes, or eating, or faffing about on the internet, but the assumption is that you’re not giving your full attention to whatever is playing on the screen. This as opposed to watching a movie in the cinema, where you’re forced to pay your full attention to the movie. But with anime, if you’re not fluent in Japanese, if you cannot rely on hearing the dialogue to tell you when you have to pay attention again, you tend to watch a show in the same way as if you were watching a movie in the cinema. If only because you need to see the subtitles to know what’s happening.
And because, like most television, an anime series is created with the understanding that it will be watched by people who are not giving it their full attention, so there will be redundancies built into each episode. Exposition, recaps, repeats of important information from earlier in the episode, etc. Which is fine for the original Japanese audience, but if you’re a non-Japanese, non-fluent viewer who relies on subtitles for your understanding, this redundancy stands out because you are paying attention all of the time. Especially if you’re binging a show that was originally meant to be watched weekly. You’re watching something in a way that it wasn’t meant to be watched and because you cannot look away, its redundancies are even more evident.
This is something I very much noticed in my own anime watching, where I can sometimes get annoyed by the seemingly unnecessary exposition and recaps because I am paying such close attention to it. Especially with a more ambitious series, I sometimes don’t actually want to watch as much as I want to have watched it, because I cannot look away for fear of missing something yet there are long stretches where nothing interesting seems to happen. At those times I’d rather watch something simpler, a kids show like Precure or Aikatsu which I can watch while doing something else, as they have a set formula that guides when and when not to pay attention. This is occassionally frustrating, but at least I was used to reading subtitles already.
In conclusion then, it pays to take into account for which audience and medium a series is made, whether it was intended to be watched week by week, or binged like a Netflix series. Whether or not it was intended to be paid close attention to or rather had built-in redundancies for an audience not expected to pay full attention to it. It’s still fair to criticise a series for over exposition or a reliance on recaps or repeats, but if you don’t take into account these things, you cannot understand why a series does what it does.
Kenneth Clark is a testament to the fact that having an Oxbridge education makes you perfectly suited to spouting bullshit with confidence standing in front of pretty pictures, as funded by BBC largesse.
Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation is held up as a ground breaking documentary series, both in presentation and content. And it is indeed impressive, even almost fifty years on, with gorgeously filmed landscapes, buildings and art. But actually watching the first episode was a crashing disappointment. I knew that it was very much an old school approach to history, that this would be European and European history only, Whiggish and with very definite ideas on what civilisation entails. But still.
Clark starts out from the Fall of Rome, which is presented as an unalloyed disaster, causing the flame of civilisation to almost burn out. He then moves on to how it did manage to survive, in England and France, how new challenges arose as the Vikings came raiding and how Charlemange saved civilisation. The various successor states of the western Roman Empire are dismissed as barbarians, the Arab and Muslim civilisations barely mentioned, even the Byzantine Empire is sneered at as not quite the done thing. It’s such a narrow minded, boring view of history it set me against watching any of the rest of it.
What a difference Carl Sagan’s Cosmos makes. Sagan’s deeply humanist approach to science and astronomy sees him traveling the world to explain the history of his discpline, from ancient Greek scientists in Egypt, to meeting Japanese fishermen who refuse to eat crabs with carapaces resembling samurai to tell about natural selection, to visiting the monuments the Anasazi left behind as proof of their astronomical measures. There’s a joy and kindness in his narration that makes me want to keep watching.
This is actually my first time watching Cosmos: if it was broadcasted on Dutch television when it was originally released, I was too young for it. Yet Cosmos was very important to me growing up, as the accompanying book was translated into Dutch and available at my local library and I must’ve read it half a dozen times as a kid. It was reading this that helped make me an atheist, as in it I found a much more logical and appealing explanation for the world around me than some all powerful god having created it all from scratch.
Clark’s view of history is dour and joyless, unappealing in the extreme by comparison. Glad it was Sagan that got his hooks in my brain back then.
the Mangaka who came in from the cold — Below is a small selection of four manga artists and one writer who are being overlooked by American publishers. They work, by and large, within the field of seinen, a loosely defined category of manga anthologies ostensibly geared towards young adult males in Japan. Admittedly the sample’s homogeneity is partly a result of my own preference as a reader towards this niche, but seinen takes on a special relevance these days as well.
On VidCon, Harassment & Garbage Humans — To kick off the Women Online panel at VidCon last Thursday, the moderator posed the question: Why do we still have to talk about the harassment of women? I replied, “Because I think one of my biggest harassers is sitting in the front row.”
Beowulf and the Comic Book: Contemporary Readings — This paper explores the appropriation of the Old English poem by modern popular culture in such a distinctive 20th-century art-form as the comic book, which proves that a heroic, legendary story already old for the Anglo-Saxons —it was set in geardagum, “the ancient days”— still elicits the interest of the audience in the modern world.
This week’s Bookscan chart is a wake-up call for the comics industry — Let me spell it out for you: girls and women, black and white, cis and trans alike, are the driving force behind comics readership expansion. This has been happening for a while, but it’s a full on avalanche now. It’s also something I saw coming 25 years ago. (No one else is gonna pat me on the back so I gotta do it myself.) Seeing the devoted fandoms that female content-consumers developed for anything that interested them, ESPECIALLY genre material like paranormal romance, horror and fantasy – I had a hunch that once they turned their spotlight on comics, the full force of female fandom would bowl over the fragile shreds of male safe spaces like a Mack truck through a pile of empty Axe cartons.
