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Grief is still weird — Friday Funnies

Published on January 14, 2022Leave a comment

I’ve had dreams like this. Dreams in which Sandra was alive and I realised halfway through that hey, shouldn’t you be dead? Never quite sure which ones were worse: those, or the ones in which I only noticed after waking up. The dreams itself weren’t bad, just the same mix of anxiety dream and vague memories of living together in a house we’ve only lived in in dreams. It’s just the realisation that this is not real that hurts. No surprise than that this page from chapter 67 of Kuzushiro’s Ani no Yome to Kurashite Imasu / Living with my Brother’s Wife hit me raw.

A manga page showing a girl seeing her dead brother eating breakfast and getting excited he is actually alive before waking up

Kishibe Shino is a seventeen year old girl whose married brother died six months ago, leaving her as well as his wife and her sister-in-law Nozomi behind. She has no other family, her parents having died when she was much younger. Therefore she’s living together with her sister-in-law, determined to not be a burden to her, while she is equally determined to be a shoulder Shino can lean on to. Most of the series is Shino and Nozomi learning to live together as a family when all they had in common was the person they’re both still mourning. Grief is an understated, but continuous presence in the story and around chapter 67, from which this is taken, the story has progressed towards the one year anniversary of his death. And because most of the story is centered around two awkward people learning to form a family together, with their grief in the background, chapters like this that center it, hit that much harder.

Is Akebi-chan fetishistic? Is it bad if it is?

Published on January 12, 2022Leave a comment

Akebi-Chan No Sailor-Fuku is a simple story of a girl from what even the cast of Non Non Biyori would call the sticks, who has spent the entirety of primary school being the only pupil in her class, going to the middle school of her dreams. A school her mother also attended, where she will finally get to wear a sailor uniform. She always wanted to wear one because her favourite idol wore one as well. And then it turns out the school uniform changed to blazers years before. Whoops. Luckily the head of the school allows Akebi-chan to wear her sailor uniform anyway, seeing as how much she wanted to and how much work her mother put in it to create it. That’s basically the first episode, but that simple story isn’t what you watch this show for. No, it’s the sheer pleasure and joy with which Akebi-Chan No Sailor-Fuku shows off its protagonist’s physicality, the confidence with which hair, clothing and body movement are animated:

Much of the craft shown in this first episode is explained by the presence of Megumi Kouno, who e.g. animated some of the best sequences in the original IdolM@ster series. It all looks great, a standout in a season full of duller, by the numbers series, but there’s something slightly uncomfortable about it. As Alex Henderson noted in their review it all feels a bit fetishy?

I’m sure it’s not an aspect that everyone will notice, and it’s not an aspect that will detract from everyone’s experience with the show. And it’s a fraught topic to discuss, because it’s not “fan service” in the traditional use of the word, not explicitly sexual imagery or framing or placing the female characters in compromising positions. There’s a scene of Komichi and her little sister in the bath together that manages to be very frank and un-leery about their nudity, which I was impressed by until I started noticing other things that the storyboarding did focus on with an adoring intensity: an extra-shiny pair of lips here, an extra-crinkly piece of fabric against a girl’s body there.
Then Komichi walks in on a new classmate mid-pedicure, and this habit becomes hard to ignore. And it… complicates things, because I genuinely do want to praise this show for its use of visual storytelling and characterization. I want to nod and smile and say this show did a great job using the visual medium to provide a window into the emotional day-to-day life of a pretty authentic-feeling young teen girl. I want to be able to celebrate the intricate, intimate picture this premiere builds without wondering if all this detail was put there for as fetish fuel for someone.

There’s nothing of the usual fanservice in Akebi-Chan: no leering camera angles, no accidental groping, no overtly emphasises busts or butts, nothing that we’ve learned to recognise as fanservice. Akebi-chan’s clothing, including her sailor outfit is more practical and far less sexy than that of most anime school girls. When there is nudity, it’s non-sexual: Akebi taking a bath with her little sister, Akebi trying on her new uniform. And yet…

Is it because we’re trained by other anime that we see some of this as fetishised, as sexual, like the pedicure scene Alex mentions? Or is this fetishistic but in a way we’re not familiar with? And if so, is this bad? Having read through the manga after having seen this first episode and pondering Alex’s review, I can’t help but think that it is the mangaka’s fetish, their obsessions that makes the series what it is. There are entire chapters that are little more than an excuse to show off Akebi in movement, dancing or running or playing. The author seems obsessed with making sure the way her clothing and hair move are as pretty as possible. To choose a girl in middle school seems dodgy, but it never quite felt sexualised for me? It’s more like the artist just likes to draw pretty people, something that becomes very clear with Akebi’s father, who looks like the sort of fifties deep in the closet sports hunk.

For me, if this is indeed the result of the author’s fetishes, I can live with that. Reardless of the author’s intentions, it doesn’t come over as wank fodder. What attracts me in both the manga and the anime is the beauty of bodies in motion and the way it’s depicted for me stays on the right side of creepy. Your mileage may vary of course; I can well understand that for other people this is too fetishistic, too reminiscent perhaps of how some people look at you in real life.

Should Corbyn stand as an independent?

Published on January 10, 2022Leave a comment

So Jeremy Corbyn has had the whip withdrawn from him for over a year now and this weekend Labour made noises about appointing somebody else to stand in his constituency in the next elections. That of course immediately started speculation about whether or not he should run as an independent or start his own party. There’s little doubt that Corbyn could do this and very likely would win as an independent, but would he do so?

That’s the real question: would Corbyn want to stand in election again in the first place? The man’s seventytwo now, would he want to be in parliament for another five years, pushing eighty at the end of it? Or would he rather spent his time on activism outside of parliament, via his new Project for Peace and Justice? If denied to stand as a Labour candidate, would Corbyn have the will to stand as an independent against his old party? Nothing in his history suggests he has anything but a deep abiding loyalty to Labour even when the party has no loyalty to him or his ideals. He has never shown that sort of spite that could compel him to ‘wreck’ Labour like that.

The other question is what it would accomplish, other than schadenfreude when some parachuted in Starmeroid inevitably loses their deposit? Could a hypothetical left of Labour party build on a Corbyn win in the next elections, or would it be just a stunt, ala Galloway and Respect? Is it actually worthwhile to pursue a parliamentary solution or should the left’s energy be more constructively used outside it, in the unions for example? Is there the infrastructure in place to make this more than just the Corbyn show?

Anti-Idol industry Idol story: Selection Project — Anime 2022 #006

Published on January 9, 2022Leave a comment

I have to admit, the ending of the first episode of Selection Project had me completely fooled. It seemed to be pointless drama, a cheap way to inject some tension into what seemed a foregone conclusion. As we follow our protagonist Miyama Suzune through the regional finals of the 7th season of the Selection Project, she seems to have it in the bag. We get flashbacks to her as a little girl stuck in hospital, listening to the winner of the first Selection Project, wanting to be an idol as well but knowing it’s impossible. We get to see her say goodbye to her family to go to the regional finals, where she meets up with the other candidates. It’s clear by the focus on her that she’s the best of the four candidates and will win easily. But then when she sang her song, this happens:

Our protagonist falls down while singing

I always dislike the sports anime gimmick of having your protagonist lose because of a conveniently timed injury. What’s worse, in the very next episode it was resolved by having the actual winner drop out and Suzune taking her place as the runner up. I did not understand why this was needed, why this plot development was necessary. That’s because I was treating it as a standard idol competition show, rather than what it actually was: an anti-idol industry idol show. A show where everybody wins, everybody is friends and everybody is an idol:

All the Selection Project finalists singing

Hang on, that sounds familiar. That sounds a lot like the Hibiki arc in PriPara season 2. In PriPara every girl could be an idol if she wanted to, until super idol Hibiki challenged that by arguing that no, only those with real talents should be idols and the rest should be content just watching it. And that’s exactly the attitude of a idol talent show like the Selection Project: there can only be one winner. And just like PriPara did, so too does Selection Project prove this attitude wrong.

9-tie in action

You know how these shows are supposed to work. With every new challenge, every new stage some candidates are supposed to drop out. But here this never happens. Everybody wins, everybody survives. Even when in the final stage the nine girls are forced to vote themselves who needs to drop out, it doesn’t work. They all get disqualified because they all vote for themselves. And not even this is the end: the girls form their own, independent idol group called 9-tie (cutie) and hold street performances until they get big enough for the Selection Project production company to invite them back to hold the finals as a group rather than as rivals. Yes, of course this is all a very idealised view of the industry, but it works.

Legendary idol Amasawa Akari

What gives this series its hear and why I should’ve trusted that Suzune’s convenient fainting was more than just cheap drama, is the relationship between her and Amasawa Akari, the idol who won the very first Selection Project. Akari died in a car crash three years ago and had been Suzune’s inspiration. For one of the fellow contestants though she was more than that, she was her sister. And Suzune has to team up with her, becomes friends and discovers just how much of Akari is in her. Suzune’s medical condition, the reasons why she was in hospital and how it still impacts her now, all are important and that convenient fainting was just the first hint of that. All of it is tied up with Akari and her younger sister and the way how is in hindsight very obvious, but again it worked.

Snow & Steel — Peter Caddick-Adams

Published on January 7, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Snow & Steel

Snow & Steel: the Battle of the Bulge 1944 – 45
Peter Caddick-Adams
872 pages including notes and index
published in 2014

Nuts!

The story of the Bulge should be familiar. Hitler’s last roll of the dice, an offensive that nobody expected. The goal: to split the western allies apart by reconquering Antwerp. Elite panzers racing through the Ardennes, reliving the glory days of May 1940, expecting little resistance from the outnumbered and inexperienced American forces stationed there. the allied airfoces, grounded by bad weather and unable to come to the rescue. The unexpected resistance and Hitler’s hopes smashed at Bastogne, when after an imperious demand to surrender now the town was surrounded, the commanding American officer responded with a simple “Nuts!”

It’s a great story, a story the town of Bastogne dines out on to this very day. When I was there on holiday last October literally every second shop window had something about the siege in its display. It also has the benefit of being mostly true. But it isn’t the entire truth of the Ardennes Offensive, or Peter Caddick-Adams wouldn’t have needed almost nine hundred pages to tell its story. There were other sieges beside Bastogne, other places where American resistance held up the Nazi attack long enough for it to ultimately fail, other tales of heroism and tragedy to be told. Arguably, one could say that the fate of the offensive had been determined long before Bastogne had even been reached. Similarly, the story didn’t end when the siege of Bastogne was lifted. There was more hard fighting to be done, fighting which lasted into January and February of 1945.