Five years and a day since the last time I did one of these. From Black cat #13, September 1948, as drawn by Lee Elias. Elias is one of those giants of the Golden Age of comics who is now more obscure than he should be. He’s also English, it appears, as the profile in the same issue makes clear:
Like seemingly half the internet I got sucked into the Hololive rabbit hole last year. I could’ve learned Swedish, or put a dent in my to be read pile, but instead I watched a bunch of anime girls play video games on Youtube, badly. Honestly, vtubers are the best invention since sliced bread: youtube streamers, but anime girls. However, it can be hard to get it if you haven’t taken the plunge yourself yet. But I got a blog and I got time, so why not showcase some of my favourite clips to try and explain it?
At almost twenty minutes this is a bit of a long video to start with, but trust me, it’s worth it. I choose it because it doesn’t require any prior knowledge of Hololive or its vtubers and because it’s hilarious on its own. All you need to know is that the smug rabbit girl with the carrots in her hair is Usada Pekora, her hapless victim is the “knight cupped” Shirogane Noel and the game they’re playing is Getting Over It.
Getting Over It is a game in which you play a bald guy stuck in a cauldron, who for obscure reasons has to climb up high enough to launch himself into space, using only his muscular upper body and oversized sledgehammer to propel himself. You can use the hammer either to catch a convenient ledge to hoist yourself up to, or by carefully angling, launch yourself at the next bit of overhang you can reach. The sort of game neither my coordination nor my patience is suited for. Watching other people play it is hilarious though. Because while it all seems so easy when somebody like Lockness06 demolishes it in less than a minute and a half, but for the average player it’s an exercise in frustration and that can be very entertaining to watch.
Shirogane Noel is usually one of the more level headed of the third generation of Hololive vtubers. Which is actually the fifth generation, as Hololive started with generation zero, the vtubers it launched with in 2017 and inbetween gen 2 and 3 also launched its gamers branch. Noel herself is emphatically not a gamer. Though like every other Hololiver she plays a lot of them on stream, she isn’t very good at them. Which is why it’s a bit of a mystery as to why she challenged Pekora to this duel. Especially when Getting Over It is such a frustrating game if you’re not good with it. Nevertheless, she’s confident that she can beat Pekora and she actually does rather well at first. That is, until Pekora decides to engage in a bit of psychological warfare…
Usada Pekora is basically Daffy Duck in crossdressing Bugs Bunny cosplay. A bad loser and a worse winner, she alternates infuriating smugness with hilariously bad excuses whenever she’s losing. Fun as she is playing solo, whenever she collaborates with any of her third generation friends, she becomes even more fun. Here we see her at her best (worst) as she pulls every dirty trick in the book to get Noel to lose confidence. While she can’t interfere directly as they’re each playing their own game, she can and does needle Noel through other means. She probably could’ve won the game without it, but why take chances?
To be honest, I understand Pekora’s desire to torture Noel. Her increasingly flustered reactions are hilarious, especially when Pekora decides the loser has to undertaker a forfeit. Maybe it’s my inner sadist, but there’s something adorable in seeing Noel get increasingly despairing at the prospect of having to be at the mercy of Pekora…
Enjoy this aerial shot of London as you start split Second (1992), as it’s about the last recognisable shot of the city.
And there we have the setting for this movie: London 2008, a city plagued by global warming and decades of pollution, which in practise means most of the sets are covered in scummy water and everything is fogged up. None of this setup actually matters to the plot and there isn’t any real reason this was set in the future. This is the least science fictional science fiction movie ever. Instead this is a combination of a serial killer movie and a buddy cop movie, just gussied up with a few sfnal props and weapons. Apart from the climax of the movie being set in a flooded Underground, there’s no real reason that this movie takes place in London either. In fact, most of the movies takes place on sets that could’ve just as well be used for some random American city.
Rutger Hauer isn’t necessarily the most subtle of actors even in the best of times, but I’ve never seen him chew the scenery as enthusiastically as he does here. Hauer started his career as a teenage heart throb in a medieval adventure series in the Netherland, before starring in several Dutch cult classics like Turks Fruit and Soldaat van Oranje. When the director of these movies, Paul Verhoeven, moved to Hollywood Hauer followed him. You know him of course as Roy Batty in Blade Runner, but perhaps also as the villain in The Hitcher, or from Flesh + Blood or Ladyhawke. His movies aren’t always classics, but they’re always entertaining. In Split Second he’s Harley Stone, a hard bitten cop who lost his partner to a serial killer three years ago. Now the killer is back and Hauer is on his tracks. the stereotypical loner cop, Hauer listens to nobody and doesn’t let anything or anyone stop him from pursuing the killer. Why he has to do all that in an American accent when the movie’s set in London is never explained.
Meanwhile almost every other actor in the movie is somebody who you’d probably remember from having guest starred on Coronation Street or from having had a critically acclaimed role in some worthy BBC drama. Here we have Alun Armstrong as the police chief Trasher spouting the usual cop movie cliches to Neil Duncan, the soon to be new partner to Rutger Hauer. Both of these weren’t new to playing cops, Armstrong having been in The Sweeney and Duncan in Taggart, but here they are in what is clearly an American cop flick, somewhat out of place. Duncan especially, though he’s well suited for playing the book smart, sensitive, health conscious rookie that will get on surprisingly well with Hauer’s paranoid veteran surviving on “anxiety, coffee and chocolate”.
That mixture of American cop cliches and British actors makes for a strange movie. It actually took me until this scene, some forty minutes into its one and a half hour run time that Split Second clicked for me. Once again a familiar scene. Hauer takes Durban to his favourite bar with Durban having won a little bit of his trust. As Hauer munches down on a full English and Durban asks for a fancy tea and a crossaint, they share theories on the serial killer. Meanwhile, in Hauer’s flat, his murdered partner’s ex-girlfriend is having a shower; cue the Psycho music. Cue also a quick glimpse of Kim Cattrall’s breasts, because of course. All this is played completely straight, but the absurdity of this sort of cop movie cliche playing out against a background track of the Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin makes it all slightly absurd. And you can’t tell me this wasn’t intentional.
Because even in 1992 everything in this movie was cliched and hackneyed, yet you have a cast of serious character actors who all deliver their absurd lines with complete earnestness. Granted, this could all be a case of “I haven’t seen the movie, but I have seen the house the movie bought”, but I doubt it. This feels more like a cast having fun with something they know on its own is bad, but by taking it ultra serious, can be made into something hilarious. And that’s the charm of this movie, even if it was done by accident. Having Hauer and Durban act the shit out of their roles in their own way is what makes this movie for me. Don’t watch it for the plot, or for the science fiction, such as it is. Watch it for actors having fun. Nothing in this movie really makes sense, but you’ll enjoy it nonetheless.
Colette H. Fozard’s flouncing away from being co-chair of Discon III over at File 770 is a beautiful example of bad faith.
In my years of growing responsibility of working for Worldcons, I have become increasingly alarmed and upset at the level of abuse and vitriol spewed at the all-volunteer staff. So much so that I have now abruptly walked away from probably the best chance I had to improve matters ‘from the inside.’
After plonking down her credentials as a fan and conrunner, she opens with this beauty of a statement. Here she positions herself not just as a victim, but as somebody ‘alarmed and upset’ at how fandom apparently treats all Worldcon volunteers. It sets the tone for the rest of the post, which will keep bringing up general accusations of harassment but is light on specifics. What is also does is set up a juxtaposition between the “all-volunteer staff” and the rest of fandom, only presented here as a nebulous mass of complainers and harassers. Finally, it of course implies that it was harassment, not legitimate criticism that led to her resignation.
The proximate cause of her resignation was of course the Hugo Awards kerfuffle, in which Discon III announced by tweet that it would limit the number of people to be listed on the award to four in total. That Fozard describes it as “for the first time ever, all contributors to a Hugo finalist work would be listed and recognized as Hugo Finalists” is suspect and more than a little bit self serving. First, it’s obvious that this isn’t the part that anybody disagreed with. Second, this was not how this policy change was communicated. From what I remember (because of course the tweets in question have been deleted since), it practically lead with the restriction on the number of names allowed on the actual Hugo Award plaque. Though I understand from the ongoing debate since that limiting the number of names has been unofficial policy of multiple Worldcons, this was still the first time it was announced as official policy. Understandably this would upset people. To then to characterise the backlash like this:
NOT GOOD ENOUGH, said some of the worst abusers of Hugo Admin staff over the years. They twisted the announcement to meet their selfish ends and I had to watch my staff despair that people were yelling at us for a misunderstanding. Because there were concerns about the readability of the ballot (most vote electronically, but paper ballots are required by the WSFS Constitution) and the physical ability of how many people we could fit together in reception and ceremony spaces, we were accused of stifling BIPOC creators. A rich accusation from the white editors/gatekeepers who pride themselves on being performatively abusive, in a social media community where this is not just tolerated but rewarded.
Not. Helpful.
There are a lot of bald statements in this paragraph that needed, but didn’t get a citation: “worst abusers”, “twisted”, “white gatekeepers”, “performatively abusive”. The reality of it is that a) critics responded to the statements as put out by Discon III itself, b) it was both respectful and justified rather than abusive while c) the critics were a mixture of all kinds of fans, rather than some mythical white gatekeepers. In fact, some of the voices arguing the loudest against it where the same fans of colour who had reason to mistrust Worldcon already, what with how CoNZealand treated them last year. As I argued on Twitter, you have to put this faux pas in the context of the failures of CoNZealand to treat its Hugo finalists right. So much went wrong last year that Discon III had promised to do better and then they came out with this? Is it any wonder that people were vocal and public in their criticism?
Speaking of CoNZealand, it turns out that Fozard was involved in that fiasco as well.
If this were the first time The Internet rounded on Worldcon staff, I would be less worried, but it happens over and over. As a member of CoNZealand’s committee, I saw how upset the staff were when numerous Hugo Finalists loudly and publicly proclaimed how upset they were with their programming, did not give CoNZealand a chance to make modifications, and then ran their own programming scheme attaching the convention’s name to it without asking, and finally had the gall to remind everyone at the end that their programming might be eligible for a best related work Hugo Award.
Some sour grapes there, again being economical with the truth. Let’s be blunt here: CoNZealand fucked up and fucked up badly. It failed to include a large number of the Hugo Finalists in its programming despite many eager volunteers, it failed to respond to numerous attempts to correct this and only once the programming schedule went public leading to an equally public backlash did it finally try to put things right. All at the same time as it let George R. R. Martin and Robert Silverberg shit all over the finalists. Fozard should be embarrassed, not angry that it came so far that a fringe convention had to be set up to try and mitigate some of the damage. A fringe convention partially ran by CoNZealand staffers, I should add.
Worldcon staff are people. People who are working hard to do the right thing and put on a convention where all feel welcome. Worldcon staff should be, must be, and are held responsible to ensure their work is welcoming and inclusive as possible, but the endless cycle of assume-bad-faith, attack-without-mercy is wearying, toxic and destructive to the very community these people claim to be a part of and care about.
Let’s be clear: the one being “wearying, toxic and destructive” here is Colette H. Fozard, not some never mentioned by name group of people who get their jollies from oppressing innocent Worldcon staffers and I resent this continuous attempt to create and us vs. them situation of Worldcon staffers vs fandom. The criticism is coming from inside the house. I’ve volunteered on both of the physical Worldcons I’ve been to, even if not in such an exalted position as Fozard. I’m not the enemy. It’s an old, old trick to paint your critics as interloopers, only interested in destroying your community. That Fozard feels the need to use it makes it clear her resignation is for the best. We don’t need a Worldcon chair who sees fandom as her enemy, criticism as attack. Even as a volunteer you have a duty to do your job to the best of your abilities, to be able to handle justified criticism: if you can’t do that, you’re better off not volunteering in the first place. Certainly fandom is.
I’m not the only one who fell in love with Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! when this scene came up in the first episode, right?
There have been several series, most noticeably Shirobako, showing what working on anime is like and plenty more series that just celebrate otakus and fandom, but I can’t recall any other series being this explicitly about the joy of animation. It came at just the right time for me, the enthusiasm and genuine love Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! has for animation rekindling my own flagging interest in it. And it was this scene in particular which triggered that. It’s that experience of settling down to watch something just to be entertained for a little while and then getting hooked, of discovering a world you did not know existed. The anime Midori watches is a thinly disguised version of Mirai Shounen Conan, a 1978 anime series directed by Miyazaki Hayao. Thanks to his involvement it’s fairly well known, but it’s still a somewhat obscure choice to make as Midori’s gateway anime, a fortytwo year old series. Especially when, as far as I know, this isn’t available for streaming outside of Japan nor is currently in print as a DVD or Bluray.
Midori herself explains why this series in particular made her realise anime is something that people actually make, rather than something that just exists. She and her friend are visiting her new high school’s freshmen’s festival and they go to the anime club’s screening of an episode of “Conan of the Lost Island“. Her friend asks her why this is entertaining to her and she responds with the sort of exhaustive detail you should expect from an unfiltered anime nerd. In particular, she explains how an unexplained nonsense idea like an antigravity device powered flying car is made real by how the characters interact with it. How the extraordinary is made plausible by how it affects the characters. How showing a character running with his upper body bend forward against the wind makes him running over the wing of a flying aircraft look real even when you know it’s impossible.
Eizouken‘s high praise of the series made me want to watch Mirai Shounen Conan myself. I finally got around to it late last year, watching it over New Year’s Eve, making it the last anime I started in 2020 and the first I finished in 2021. Even without having been primed for it by Eizouken, I think I would’ve noticed Mirai Shounen Conan‘s physicality. Just take the clip from episode eight above. Conan and Lana have been running from Lana’s abductors, but their boat got hit by a cannon shell and sunk. Conan, still in magnetic cuffs from having been captured before, is stuck to a piece of debris and has to free himself. The way this is shown through Conan’s straining against his cuffs, how you can almost feel the effort he puts into trying to bend the metal he’s stuck to, the liberation once he is free, is rare in anime. Action can feel weightless in modern anime, especially when reliant on CGI. Not so in Conan. This would be impressive in a movie, but in a weekly television anime it’s even more so. The high standard set in the first few episodes is never let up. Nor is this physicality limited to key scenes. Everything is treated with the same care.
If you didn’t know Miyazaki was involved with Mirai Shounen Conan, it should be clear by the time the Falco, — the airplane above — shows up. It’s such an obvious Miyazaki design and it reminded me of the plane from The Castle of Cagliostro. A pity such a cute plane is being used by the bad guys. The underlying theme of the series may be about how science unleashed in service of greed is bad and humanity needs to return to a managable technology level, but Miyazaki still makes that technology look hella seductive. Even the world destroying monster planes featured in the narration that starts each episode look cool. That conflict between morality and aesthetic we see a lot in Miyazaki’s later works, but Mirai Shounen Conan was the first time it was displayed like this. Miyazaki can’t help but display the glamour of the very technology that his stories want to condemn. The weapon destroying the world being monstrous airplanes rather than more mundane nuclear missiles is telling in itself. A romantic touch even in armageddon.
Miyazaki’s essential humanity is also on display here: as with Terry Pratchett, few of his villains are completely unredeemable. Throughout the series there are hints given as how the sheer desparate struggle for survival made Industria into the horrible dictatorship that it is when Conan is taken there. It’s clear that in a system where people are reduced to solely how useful they are to the survival of Industria, the competition for safety, the desperation to not slide down into the unwanted masses, people become villains. As a contrast there’s High Harbour, which like Industria found itself having to rebuild civilisation from scratch, but without even the advantage of a fully functioning nuclear reactor at their disposal. High Harbour had no choice but to settle for roughly a 19th century level of technology and build a society you could live in comfortably. Industria, for all its technical prowess was still operating on “lifeboat rules”. At best it’s a system that breeds opportunists like captain Dyce, eager to do whatever it takes to earn a safe spot within it, but ready to sell it out the moment it becomes advantageous to do so.At worst, you get would-be tyrants like Lepka, eager to re-use the same weapons that destroyed the world to make himself its master. The only person with any true loyalty to Industria is Monsley, the captain of the Falco, who as a young girl saw her parents die in the apocalypse right before her eyes, she herself only saved by her dog having run away. The crimes she commits are not done out of self interest, but purely for the survival of Industria and its people. Both Monsley and Dyce are not irredeemable villains, just people driven by their terrible situation to do what’s necessary to survive.
Another way you can tell this is a Miyazaki production is through the character acting. The physicality that is key to making the fantastic believeable in his work, is also used to show the emotions and character of his personages. The first time I saw Conan running I knew this was a Miyazaki series; by the time I saw the sequence above, in episode three I was certain. The sheer physical joy in the animation is a dead giveaway. Here too physical impossibilities like Conan and Jimsy almost running vertically up that cliff side are sold both by the sheer confidence of the animation and the fact that they struggle to both fit through a bifurcated tree trunk seconds later. Each of them straining to out run the other, as shown through how thye throw their bodies foreward, stretching to gain even a centimetre of advantage. Then later, as they lose control running down hill, how it’s shown through them leaning back, attempting to break their speed without losing ground. While the movement and speed are exaggerated, the way it’s shown is firmly anchored in real life experience. You see kids running like this. Little dialogue is needed to show the stubbornness and competitiveness of Conan and especially Jimsy here.
What Mirai Shounen Conan offers is the unpolished version of what Miyazaki would perfect at Studio Ghibli. It’s a study in what you can achieve even with the limitations and the budget of a television anime. If you love animation for its own sake you need to watch this. Getting a great story and likeable characters as well is a bonus.