Bear with me. One of the more irritating ‘controversies in anime/manga/light novel/etc fandom is the localisation versus literal debate about translations and subtitles. There’s a small but loud group of mostly rightwing fans who prefer their translation to be as literal and as much like the original Japanese as possible and who see all other translations as suspect. This usual goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories about Funimation polluting their precious bodily fluids with SJW language in their translations. The idea that there’s an art to translation, that you can’t just go word by word like some robot and expect anything good or even understandable to come out of it just doesn’t land with these people.
This hasn’t stopped professional translator Sarah Moon, here comparing the excellent, slang laden puntastic official subtitles of My Dress-UP Darling/Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi o Suru with an as literal as possible translation of the spoken Japanese. It’s brilliant and hilarious and it shows just how stilted and awkward this insistence on literalness makes things. You end up with sentences that still make some sort of sense but are just never said in English, sentences that sound as if you had a stroke. It also shows just how good the unknown translator/subtitler of the series is, being able to put so much character in such a limited space. I wish Crunchyroll and other parties would actually credit their translators (and other staff) like Hi-Dive does.
If you wanted to know about NFTs, where they came from, what they’re being used for and especially why they are harmful but were afraid to ask, this is the video for you.
At almost two and a half hours it’s a long sit, but that’s because Dan Olson takes the time to set the context in which NFTs arouse. To understand NFTs you have to understand Bitcoin and all the other electronic currencies that were inspired by it, not to mention the dreaded blockchain and the whole spectre of ‘web3’ technology. As important, Olson understand that just knowing the technological context isn’t enough and therefore starts with the real driving force behind Bitcoin and NFTs: the 2008 recession.
Because in 2008 the world economy crashed and while it may superfically look like the world has recovered since, the truth is it wrecked the opportunities of an entire generation. The idea that if you get the right education, go on to get a good job you can have a good, stable career the way your parents could in the sixties had been undermined for decades of course, but the 2008 recession made it official. The ladder had been pulled up and the normal ways of bettering yourself are no longer available. Even people lucky enough to graduate and start a middle class career are finding life precarious; you may be temporarily affluent but are you secure the way your parents were secure in their careers? And it’s not just careers that are insecure: something as basic as owning your own house is increasingly out of reach of all but the most upper of middle class people. Be it London, new York or Amsterdam, it’s hard to find a house when investors routinely overbid you. The average housing price here in Amsterdam is now 10,000 euros/square metre, which means my own appartment of 48 square metres is worth half a million euros. It’s absurd.
All of which means is that life is as unstable as it has ever been since the 1930ties for the vast majority of people even in rich countries, the gap between the rich and the rest of us as great as it ever has been while ever attempt to level this gap has been smashed. We’ve seen how the establishment in the UK reacted when Jeremy Corbyn almost won the 2017 elections, which led to the Labour right smashing their own party while the entire press conspired to put Johnson in Number 10. When regular politics are no longer allowed and regular ways to have a stable career and life are equally smashed, that leads to people looking for alternatives. In politics, this lead to Trump and Brexit. Similarly, if people cannot get rich conventionally, they’ll seek out other ways of doing so. There’s a huge market of precarious, affluent middle class people ripe for exploitation.
Which brings me to Albania. A former ‘protectorate’ of fascist Italy, after liberation at the end of the Second World War it became a communist dictatorship ruled by Enver Hoxha. Hoxha was a Stalinist so orthodox that he broke with the Warsaw Pact for being too soft. Under his leadership Albania was so closed a country it made North Korea seem positively welcoming. The collapse of communism all over Eastern Europe also reached Albania and in the early nineties it became a normal democratic, capitalist state. Now if you know your recent European history, you know that all these countries that had lived under communism for almost half a century were incredibly vulnerable to capitalist exploitation and were plundered on an unprecedented scale by their own ex-communist elites and western advicers. Albania was worse than most and its economy became dominated by pyramid and ponzi schemes, with millions of people investing their savings in them. When it all collapsed in 1997 it led to civil war.
As Dan Olson argues here, all electronic currencies are pyramid schemes, people buying them to sell to a bigger fool and NFTs even more so. There’s a ready made market for them, of those precarious middle class, usually tech adjecent people who want to find a way to get rich or die trying. Which is worrying. It’s not just the godawful realities of bitcoin and NFTs, it’s that once it all burst, once all these people, already primed by Trump and Qanon, lose their shit, they’ll lose their shit and what will that mean for America?
You can’t help but sympathise with the guy being interviewed here, a funeral officer who at the height of the Covid pandemic had had to stop people from saying their last farewells, now feeling a fool for having done so when the government that set the rules never had any intent to obey them themselves
What sticks in the craw is that’s James O’Brien he’s talking to, who with his employer LBC was one of the people responsible for destroying the one credible alternative to a Johnson led Tory government back in 2019. What sticks in the craw is that all of the press currently falling over themselves to explain what a bad ‘un Boris Johnson is and who could’ve guessed, could’ve told us that in 2019 but refused to. What sticks in the craw is the pretence that having an office party is what made Johnson bad, that the failed and utterly corrupt covid strategy of the government as a whole isn’t an issue. That for the second time in a decade the Tories are responsible for mass deaths amongst the most vulnerable, first through austerity, second through herd immunity is ignored or outright denied even. But the chance at taking down a prime minister who has become an embarassment without doing damage to the larger Tory project by using this trivial issue has the same people who championed him two years ago chomping at the bit.
First Cameron, then May, now Johnson. The media install Tory prime ministers to do their dirty jobs, then discards them when no longer needed, but never questions the legitimacy of the Tories as a whole. That fate is left for anything that challenges the established order. Tell me, if democracy means that the press is allowed to ruthlessly monster anybody they take a dislike to, that only those candidates and parties acceptable to it are allowed anywhere near power and that allowance can be withdrawn at any time, how much of a democracy is the United Kingdom still?
Pause and Select‘s video about the anime media mix and the way it can shape narratives and the changes in how it has done so got me thinking. In the interview here with Marc Steinberg, who has written a book about this, they discuss how the media mix works. How a franchise like Star Wars creates a narrative through the use of different media: comics, movies, books, cartoons, television shows and how that changed for the anime media mix with Haruhi with the character becoming the world rather being part of a narrative within that world. No longer on a consistent narrative within one world, but with the narrative changing, the world altered depending on which particular bit of media you’re consuming. You’re reading for Haruhi and it no longer matters which narrative she’s part of.
Which got me thinking.
You know what sounds really similar to how Haruhi is presented and sold? How DC Comics traditionally dealt with Superman. Because what you see there is that from 1938 to the seventies, what they’re selling is not the world of Superman, where you have different stories in different media but all set in the same world, but rather the same character in different contexts. The Superman comics told different stories from the newspaper strip, the Max Fleischer cartoons, the tv and radio shows or the underoos, but had the same recognisable characters. The comics themselves were often not even that consistent, with no real continuity, taken place in an eternal present. Then there were the imaginary stories, where the writers would place Superman in deliberately world ending scenarios and presented it explicitly as not real in a very different way from how every other Superman story was not real.
In this context, the Haruhi media mix is the older model and it was Marvel which introduced the media mix as narrative, by explicitly setting its comics in the same world, with a continuity that means one story is set after another and characters can cross over into other stories, expecting the reader to pay attention and directly refering to the older story when relevant through recapping or editorial notes. At first this was of course only limited to the comics themselves, with any other media adaptations just being that, adaptations, but its ultimate form is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having introduced superhero comics continuity to the cinema, where stories can continue in different movies, tv shows and even comic books!
What sets the Haruhi media mix model apart from the Superman model is a greater self consciousness and awareness of the media mix as a whole, rather than seeing the comics or the movies as the primary component and the rest as mere adaptations, optional elements, to be discarded when no longer relevant. (Sometimes even discarding its own primary continuity, as in Crisis on Infinite Earths.) Haruhi has character as primary mode of engagement much more than Superman ever had, which still had a rough consistency across all its media elements, elements that once added, would crop up everywhere. With Haruhi on the other hand it’s just enough she’s Haruhi.
Which of course brings me to vtubers. The ultimate form of character as world, with the narrative rising organically from day to day streaming, where the core elements of the character (Subaru is a loud duck, La+ is a chuuni fork) are what sticks but the context in which they’re established barely matters. Meaning created out of thin air. The ultimate post-modern entertainment.
It’s 1974, you’re a Dutch glam rock band and you want to be different: what do you do? You take your inspiration from the pulpiest of pulp comics and create a hit out of it:
Jacula was originally a Italian fumetti comics series, published from 1969 to 1982, translated into Dutch from 1973 to 1978. Fumettie are cheap, pocket sized black and white comics printed on the worst grade of paper. Cheap and disposable entertainment, full of lurid sex and violence, made by anonymous and interchangeable writers and artists, with nothing to recommend them. Jacula is a bog standard example. Set in the 19th century, Jacula is the “queen of vampires” and travels all over the world, fighting other vampires and getting involved in horror situations, with of course at least one or two sex scenes per story. While over time there has been a re-appreciation of the fumetti, with the realisation that at least some of those anonymous creators were genuinely good at their work, I can’t say Jacula would excite anybody, at least not the issues published in Dutch. The stories are plodding, the artwork is pedestrian and there’s little to shock, no edgier than a Hammer Horror movie.
It probably sold thanks to its covers. Always better than the interior artwork, with a big helping of bare tits and the occassional bloke’s arse, lots of blood and horror, they’re doing a good job selling the much more staid interior. Maybe that’s what inspired Dutch glam rock band Lemming to create songs of it and from Lucifera, a similar series. Not bad songs either. They fit in well with that groovy age of seventies horror, that also included the fumetti that inspired them, as well as the various low budget horror movies filmed cheaply in central Europe. Watching this clip now gives me an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. These sort of cheap shlock comics are no longer being published in the Netherlands and even in Italy itself seems to be mostly gone. As for the band, they released one album in 1975, disbanded sometime in the seventies, reunited in 2002 and released one more album in 2008.
