Greetings! Briggs N. Stratton, Emergency Blogging Hologram here and I’m guest-hosting this post because someone has been neglecting their responsibilities.”
Mudakun: “Leemmee alone, go away!”
B&S: “See what I mean? five months since the last post, only a few review threads on Twitter; even those have a meh! under-tone…”
Fansplaining has a survey that will reveal your most intimate fanfiction desires!
With the winding down of Genshiken Nidaime, this blog can revert to its true form; a series of disjointed tracts from a sketchy fundamentalist cult based on vulgar readings of Dr. Saito Tamaki‘s theories on otaku subjectivity and desire. ‘Round these parts, when we ain’t doing snake-handlin’ and speakin’ in tongues (the way of pastor Hopkins), we perform the rituals of libidinised reading and appropriative secondary production; sometimes tarted up for the university heathens as “Transformative works”.
The most fearsome of these doin’s ‘o secondary production is to go into a trance and readeth, even maketh fic. As the Genshiken and Tamaki-dono hath decreed, so mote it be, even if it is best motied off-stage and out of view.
What amazing varieties and ways there be to partake in these spiritual exercises! Such love! Such devotion!
@fansplaining
Wanna help us do a BIG analysis of fanfiction tropes and themes? Our official survey is live! Please take and share:
The good folks at Fansplaining have been making and posting interesting podcasts on western fan practice (with a strong emphasis on slashy fandoms) for a while now. Notable is their commitment to posting transcripts of these, usually a week or so after the podcast.
The Genshiken is all about rude doujin makin. Draw what you know, neh? Kio-gami is a mangaka, not a light novel writer. For those us us who skivved out on drawing classes, scribbling is easier than scratching. Plaisir de texte and all that..
If you have been so bitten by the bug, or are even a bit curious I commend to you the Fansplaining survey; so that you might opine (and gaze in awe!) on their introductory typology of western fic tropes. The survey biases towards slashy narratives, bien sur, because there just ain’t that many dudes writing long grinds about their epic FPS map clearing forays. The absence of sections on machine-generated crapfic and on trollfic are also telling. I am a bit saddened even as the omission is understandable.
That Halo troll-fic machinima ain’t got no schmex might be the most convincing proof of the existence of a merciful deity yet.
Behind my flippant tone is of course a small dumpster full of shame — hey, it’s a guy thing. But the fun of reading or trying one’s own hand at a short “what-if” with your fave charas is more than just a diversion. Nothing short of scanlation encourages such close reading as trying to jam your headcanon onto an existing property. You really, really begin to obsess over minutiae. Even a trash ship (one of those can’t exactly define it but you’ll know it when it sneaks up and bites you on the leg things) demands a serious and very detailed consideration of the original materials. The only risk is having your mind gripped by the unshakeable conviction that the author pulled their lame compromise resolution out of -ahem- the air and that the only possible way it could have gone (if the editors hadn’t spiked it) would have been a beach-front marriage in Hawaii.
Followed by a Saturday afternoon spent shopping for curtains.
Or
113 pages of wooden dialogue between two very hungover idiots trying to wrap their aching heads around their predicament.
Or…
Oh my! So many possibilities. This woobie thing; maybe that’s a bit too squick?
A while back, I regged up an account for myself on Academia.edu. It is a good place to find academic papers, excerpts and pdf reprints of some of the theoretical writings surrounding Japanese popular culture. You need to be registered to download these as pdfs.
Perhaps I spent too much of my life in University. I have two master’s degrees, a whatever BA, plus an honors undergraduate degree in Fine Arts; the infamous BFA. As there used to be no PhD in the Fine Arts, this counted for something. Also, I have very little artistic talent in the conventional sense, so I often feel that the BFA is my “best” degree. And yes, the few solo shows that I have had have been well received. I cheat; I think things out then work hard at it.
As an academic, I am probably a wash-out. I am sloppy, hate academic rigor and find too much of what goes on within the walls of academe boring and pointless. Big fan of University clubs though; they were fun.
So occasionally I will review and/or incorporate a sloppy review of an academic paper that I find important when I “go on about something“. When I feel really bored, I might indulge in sophomoric exercises, such as seeing how the second part of the Genshiken rates on the Bechdel Test. One evening, I decided to post a list of all the search terms that wordpress.com captured, from search engines queries used to find my blog. The I uploaded a pdf of the post to Academia.edu
Porn, linux distros and cat pictures; not even.
This blog gets a modest 30-50 visits a day. I am guessing that perhaps %5 – %20 of theses visitors are here to read odd little essays that go on and on about manga, anime and the like. The rest must be disappointed, or at least puzzled:
Where iz de hawt steamy pr0ns?
I should just delete that post and the pdf version of it on Academia.edu. All the traffic just goes to show that the long-in-the-tooth, circa 1996 page view boosting trick of hiding search words in a transparent frame behind your page’s main text still can work, especially if you are running a p0rn site. But I won’t delete them. Not yet. I want to see what happens next. Welcome to my latest conceptual art piece, and yes, since I have the ticket, it is as “real” as any other work of conceptual art.
Note my finely honed hipster irony.
As well, the fandom that Kio Shimoku tells stories about is marked by the curious fact that their weird little stories are chock full o’ schmex. The adult content is part and parcel of how the stories pose questions of identity and behaviour. They map the shape of their readers’ hearts.
No schmex, no force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
In a similarly curious way, both dumps of “raw data” listing the search terms, plus the way these terms attract further searches, prove the point, while begging further questions. Neverending earthly desires. The page-view stats are flattering. Maybe some of them really are here for the posts? Nice to be fancied. Top %1.
Team Muda blasts off at the speed of light!
I would like to thank the Academy.
PS: For those of you who feel that I have wasted your time with this post, here is something -neat!- found in a pile noted by Dr. Ogiue Maniax.
A bit later: Since I am dropping videos into my posts for no reason, here’s a magnificent ear-worm that just drifted into view:
(And for those of you unfamiliar with the original, you will not find anything close to this tune or song or even the complete linear dialogue that makes up the song within the Monogatari animes. The entire arrangement of the music, clipping the dialogue to build the vocals, autotuning and beat matching, cutting the video clips, all of it, is a magnificently hacked fan production!)
.
Comiket is this weekend, I haven’t done up my review of the Spring 2015 mini-international-comiket that I managed to attend back in March. I was looking at my pictures and they are all kind of meh! I wanted to follow the rules and was too flustered at being completely unable to function in Japanese to sign-language-annoy table folk and volunteers for permission to photograph more than a couple of them up close. Almost all the pix are sweeping wide crowd shots of folk’s backs. Boring! I barely got to talk with anyone, because I suck speaking Japanese, didn’t push my luck and demand a minder/ interpreter (I wangled a press pass) and ended up completely overwhelmed. I also overloaded myself with gear and managed to get a mild scolding for plopping myself down on the grass out in back next to the garbage bins and sneaking a smoke. Gomen! How embarrassing. (there were plenty of Japanese style pariah pits in the front of the convention halls, but I was too bagged to trudge back to them, gehh! Outlanders, can’t trust us with anything… )
The critical anthology Fandom Unbound has an interesting chapter on Comiket and it could be integrated into a post…
There are also chapters on cosplay and rotten girls, and something that is hanging un-mentioned in the Genshiken-verse that needs some poking with a stick. Nidaime OVA #4; there I said it. No yuri here, no way, nope, not in the Genshiken. Lets change the subject fast. Quick, nudge Hato into a fugue-out, whew!
But these will have to wait because…
I HAVE TO SAVE THE JAPANS !!! (again)
…Ah, is that so Commander? I really have to run!
.
Normally I would try to drop the idea onto some of the more well-known English-language blogs about life in Japan, something like the bitingly funny Japanese Rule of Seven, and hope they pick up on it but this is far too serious a matter. Comiket is upon us again, tourism to Japan is picking up, the Olympics are only a few years away and yet…
…The specter of disappointing, weak canned vending machine coffee!
I’m serious! You can’t fool me, Alien Jones. Your coffee sucks! All Japanese vending machine canned coffee is piss-ant weak, tragically, disgustingly unsatisfying, homeopathic, cheap-ass, zero strength useless brown-ish dishwater water. (perhaps there are a few perc-into-a-cup style machines left somewhere in Japan, but mostly its canned coffee if you want coffee) Sometimes it smells coffee-like, but don’t let that fool you, your disappointment will only be greater. And I sooooo wanted to believe! Sure it comes in nifty heated metal cans. Sure it has coffee-looking pictures on the cans. Sure you can get a can for Y100-Y140 almost anywhere. Sure they have the world’s kewlest commercials for it: none of it matters if the coffee is weak swill.
…Where I come from, we call it Kitten Coffee
.
This coffee is not acceptable and must be denounced! (4)
The crying shame of it is that Japan rally really knows coffee – almost in a biblical sense. They are very, very, very good at coffee – except when they put it in a can in a vending machine. They make coffee to die for; to die, have some dribbled on your cold corpse lips and resurrect for. Coffee at their Starbucks is better than coffee at your Starbucks and Japanese Starbucks coffee is middling good on the scale of what you can get in Japan. Sure you might end up paying Y500-Y800 a cuppa, but it will be a wonderful experience. I recommend the little chocolate cakee thing too, even if it runs you another Y1000.
On the low-end of the scale 7-Eleven is pushing out brewed coffee in a big take-out cup for Y100, and all their stores have nice clean restrooms as well. No reports yet as to whether that Y100 cuppa has any guts though!
And we need to talk guts here.
Weak coffee is the world’s number one cause of salaryman burnout, falling productivity, depression and even suicide. The reason all those Japanese companies make their employees work 12-14 hour shifts is because everyone is so burned out and zombie-fied that they are getting nothing done. And when they need a lift? Hah! Nothing but a cruel disappointment! The entire breakdown of the Japanese family, the hellish hours, the absent breadwinner, the alienation and despair can all be attributed to weak canned coffee!
Oh sure, weak coffee has its place; some folks have delicate innards or get the shakes after 10 or 12 real cups and might need to take it easy for the rest of the night. A few tormented souls may even find that coffee is not their cup of tea, but since this is Japan, we pretty well have the tea thing covered, neh? I will mention one more thing: every single co-worker or boss that I have worked with that made a fuss and insisted on weak-ass coffee in the workplace coffee-maker has turned around and stabbed me in the back. I shit you not. So it is not as if I am equating a preference for thin insipid pseudo-coffee with personal moral bankruptcy or psychopathic behavior but the coincidence leaves me cautious. Fool me once…
“”Back in the ’70s, one of Coca-Cola Japan’s regional distributors came out with one of the first canned coffees, Max, and when it tried to expand the brand, Coca-Cola in America wouldn’t subsidize it because it couldn’t understand the concept of coffee in a can. But when Max took off, the parent gave in and Georgia was born, as well as the whole canned coffee culture in Japan.
Boss, which Suntory launched in 1992, is now the second-biggest-selling line, and the company has invested a lot in trying to overtake Coca-Cola. In 2000, Boss sales were about a third of Georgia’s. Now they’re about two-thirds.”
Anyone old enough to remember American restaurant coffee from the 1970’s? It was just as miserable and weak as the Japanese canned stuff is now. Back then, unless you got lucky and found a pot of joe that had been slowly turning to tar on the truck-stop Bunn-o-matic all night (Ah! Heaven! 100-mile coffee!), a cuppa at the lunch counter would probably be a weak and foolish insult to the coffee gods, even if it came with free refills. This grievous bit of culinary malpractice must have traveled across the seas and settled in as a tradition in the Japanese market when Coke Japan started putting the joe in a can. While the Japanese are world-class at mastering whatever strikes their fancy, they are also sticklers for authenticity and tradition. Japanese vending-machine coffee perfectly recreates weak 1970’s mid-America lunch counter coffee. The very horror that brought about the 1980’s retail revolution in North American coffee consumption, launched a thousand Starbucks and infested entire inner cities with hipsters in its blowback still lives in every Japanese vending machine that dispenses canned coffee.
You can see how desperate a situation this is.
Not that I have not been warned about the futility of using an English language outlander blog to gripe about Japanese practices, and not that I don’t take Rachel Matt Thorn’s heartfelt admonitions seriously (1) but what else can I do? The country I love to visit, the country of manga, anime, yummy food and she-who-up-with-me-puts is in peril! Dare I stand quietly by?
I am not suggesting that they destroy what some might now consider a Japanese tradition. The Japanese rebuild their temples every 40 years or so and they have been drinking weak-assed canned coffee for that long, so by now weak-assed canned coffee is probably as traditional as mikos piloting giant robots. But innovation lives side by side with tradition in Japan! Red Bull and native Japanese taurine energy drinks (that 3000 stuff is freaking amazing, but it ain’t coffee) are all over the shelves of their every-8th-storefront drug stores. (Drug stores in Japan; there are probably more of them than combinis) You just need to present decent coffee in a can as something new, possibly with a nifty manga or anime tie-in to give the market a long-withheld and well-deserved caffeinated boost. Our hero Too Much Coffee Man probably won’t work for Japan. The traditional tough-guy manly man who prefers deeds rather than words is already maxed out. Boy-band members are wimpy. Wimpy we got too much of already.
A pro wrestler might be a good choice, or Murcielago, or both! Otherwise Japan is going to get desperate and start drinking the great lukewarm sticky evil: US-style Mountain Dew (2)
The Horror! The Horror!
Immediate stopgaps are possible: Alcohol free coffee liqueur in a can; Kaluha Free Zero (or would it be Zero Free?). Something built on the idea of espresso (although real espresso is strong on flavor and aroma, but curiously easy on the caffeine). Where is Starbucks when you need them? Given the “pedigree” of their name in Japan they would probably avoid rocking the boat and would make any canned coffee just as pathetically weak as everybody else’s. That’s the way things are done in Japan. You show respect for tradition.
Well screw that. Japan makes awesome coffee, in a cup. The best minds of the planet must be mobilized into cajoling the big Japanese beverage companies into sticking it into a thin little cans and putting it into their vending machines, hopefully by yesterday.
There! I’ve done my duty. Hopefully the call will spread and the forces of righteous coffee enjoyment will prevail. We can all look forward to the dawning of a new age in Japan, and then slowly, inexorably across the planet as strong, tasty canned coffee becomes as well-know a Japanese innovation as cup-o-noodles.
For Great Justice!
Holy Shit! it’s almost 6am. How the &^%$& did I manage to stay up all night on this stupid post?
(0) Grrrr! Just noticed the ad-blocker and privacy plugins are suppressing WordPress photo captions and some of the embedded videos. So now I have to put the captions in the text and hope the formatting makes sense. Oh Lord give me strength!
(1) Rachel Matt Thorn’s blog is curiously down/ and/ or looks like it has been grabbed by a troll trying to sell foreign exchange trading tips. See this Japan Times post for a precis of their argument: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2015/01/11/voices/need-talk-japan-english/ So I might be outlander-complaining. No way, I am trying to SAVE Japan from the scourge of fake weak coffee that is at best a misapprehension of an American mistake, at worse a furreign corporate plot!
(2) Mountain Dew is made by a special process that absorbs ambient room heat so that it is always tepid. The Canadian version is not jacked with extra caffeine.
(3) redacted
(4) The tagline from a legendary story from around these parts. An old woman of apparent Eastern European extraction and somewhat military airs enters a hippy-ish coffee shop, sits down at a table, pulls out a thick commie book and notebook and pencil and then asks the server in a loud voice: “Is the coffee here acceptable, or must it be denounced?”
Much Later: Well, that will learn me!
Replying with a link to this post to a tweet by a famous Japan blogger and… got one of my worknyms banned from his twitter feed. I feel like… WhatdidIdo? WhatdidIdo? Jeesh, I really respect his work too. All I can figure is that it looks like he is having troll trouble and he may have mistaken me for??? Or, he really likes “mild” canned coffee of the Japanese vending machine variety and took umbrage. Or he has one that is strong andI inadvertently slandered it? Poor reporting on my part? What? I should develop a thicker skin, but i still feel weird the way it happened. It cannot be helped.
Wherein I get tangential and subjective (again) while considering the not-quite intersections of real life, work, fiction and fandom. Not too much about Genshiken this time. Caution: weird digressions on leaving town, sewer clearing and car repair ensue.
15 years ago I was dreaming of being a band manager of a post-punk novelty band, trapped in Hong Kong and pursued by angry gangsters. All because I really, really needed to get out the town I lived in.
.
Nothing quite sets the mood for the holidays like a a bit of Scrooge and his 3 ghosts. While I have given up on my conceit that Kio Shimoku should just drop everything and do a Hato- is- visited- by- his- 3- stands (or two stands plus “Where should I go?” guy), I still appreciate an innovative retelling of a classic, especially if it can serve as an excuse to forgo the original.
And since I am Canadian, I might as well hold out for an anime-esgue retelling of Forsyth’s The Shepherd, done by studio SHAFT and the Bakemonogatari team:
“He held station alongside me for a few seconds, down moon of me, half invisible, then banked gently to the left. I followed, keeping formation with him, for he was obviously the shepherd sent up to bring me down, and he had the compass and the radio, not I…”
I need more silly stories to displace the previous silly stories that got stuck in my wetware.
The blame for A Klingon Christmas Story and the whole Klingon language thing that turned STTOS Klingons from cold-war artifacts into flawed yet noble alien-furreign “others” can be laid at the feet of the scriptwriters and fans (and fan scriptwriters) who took the sneaky, duplicitous evil commie Russian/ Chinese enemy late cold-war stand-ins of the 1960’s (the Romulans were “good” German WWII submarine captains) and turned them into Japanese Cat Samurai in the manner of Larry Niven’s Kzinti. The present-day appeal of cosplay Klingon is obvious from the theater clip: you get to be loud, speak in short, harsh, spat out syllables and posture heroically. A Klingon warrior does everything loud and heroically – except when they are heroically trying to control themselves and remain silent, for a few moments, before exploding in a loud and heroic manner.
“It is not a victory unless you say `Jumanji´.” – Slavoj Žižek
There are more reasons to create imagined others and stories for them then there are readers and viewers to consume them, so perhaps it is a fool’s errand to try to hunt down some of the tastier similarities and make wild guesses about them.
“It’s the slightly late brain-eating fungus from beyond the colours of time that gets the Doritos!” – Slavoj Žižek
While trolling around Academia.edu I saw a paper listed by James Welker, I like his writings, so when I found that the actual essay had yet to be uploaded, I emailed him a request for it and found out that it was developed for a conference talk and was not available, but that a related essay on the manga Yuri Danshi (aka Yuri Boys), in Japanese and part of a current special edition on Yuri as a genre by the Japanese pop culture magazine Eureka.would soon pop up.
Those of you who follow such things might remember what Eureka did back in 2006 with fujoshi and their fiction. Short answer: No Eureka yaoi issue, no Genshiken Nidaime as we know it. I wonder if they did an issue on popular misrepresentations of the “trans*” spectrum? They do seem to have the gift of grabbing fringe enthusiasms and dragging them out into the light of pop culture critique and commerce.
I was a bit surprised when James Welker wrote back to fill me in on the above details and to add that the latter work would eventually show up on Erica-sensei’s great yuricon project/ web domain, as part of a translation of the entire issue, along with the section by Erica Friedman herself.
So Yuri about to try for another breakout in Japan, neh?
This prompted a rabbit hunt for a look-see at Yuri Danshi, the manga. First stop; the Okazu review. Executive summary: odd premise, creepy male gaze. Doesn’t seem to function as intended. Further blog reviews; file under the Ring-tailed Roarer heading: Apparently it parades BL style cartoon bishies around while they act like male flip-side versions of rotten girls and try to ship any and all females who come into their view.. 4Chan /u -style LFB yuri goggles… In a Japanese high school.
Time for a drinking game where all sentences have to have the phrase “In a Japanese High School” appended to them.
It seems that the Yuri Danshi manga wanted to both swim and fly, so it grew scales and feathers and thereafter found that it could do neither.
Further digging turned up four volumes of raws and the listing of the series on the “dropped projects” pile of a major scanlation group. Also a bit of title disambiguation: Yuri Danshi is also the name of a photo-book of Japanese otokonoko / otomeyaku cross-dressing guys who dress up as Japanese school girls and pose with longing glances at each other.
.. In a Japanese high school.
You see they look like Japanese pop culture style faux schoolgirls doing the yuri titillation thing, but they are really….
.. In a Japanese high school.
Which is a quick and messy way of summarizing the complaint and the project of people who want to see real (istic) lesbian experiences reflected in their lesbian characters and what they are striving to change. Past Yuri was for the most part always a bunch of guys making up the whole “lesbian” thing for their (our) own prurient (and / or other) reasons. Kinda like the boys in drag from the other Yuri Danshi. Real women who happened to like other real women felt a bit left out, if not righteously cheesed off at some of the distortions that crept into the stories. Undoubtedly it was and remains complicated. I am sure some Japanese people find Belushi’s Samurai Deli skit a hoot.
Unlike the rotten girl tribes of Japan and their Euro-ethnic slash cousins, male heterosexual enthusiasts of hawt rezbian pwp pr0n have yet to adopt apologetic tones along the lines of the “these characters are in no way meant to depict real… and exist only for our own sadly rotten tastes and enthusiasms” warnings that preface so many slash/ BL/ yaoi fan archives. Dominant cultures seldom apologize for their excesses; we just kind of kick the embarrassing old stuff to the curb and make pleasant noises about the new, more sensitive and inclusive (and curiously hawt in its more truthy-ness -ness) stuff.
“To know your Asian girlfriend, you must become your Asian girlfriend.” -Slavoj Žižek, apres Sun-Tzu
And there are always reasons beyond the solitary vice why such exercises continue to hold such appeal. Why on earth is Kio Shimoku investigating “the problems of creativeness” (Google it; it is the title of an acerbic short sci-fi tale) as the “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Male Crossdressing BL Mangaka” ???
Gimme a bit more time, I’m still working on it…
Why did the author of the light novel series and the SHAFT crew behind the Bakemonogatari franchise feel the need to invent a young athletic monkey-arm-cursed female character who calls herself a lesbian and have her do an exorcism in her own (and IMHO far superior to the gormless male hero’s previous efforts) way? And then drape the story in cheesy Yuri visual motifs and title it apres the signature s-class tale of f/f love and friendship from 1920’s Japan?
.. In a Japanese high school.
One idea presents itself: the Bakemonogatari crew (who I bet are mostly or all male) heard of, or intuited something like Erica -sensei’s rules for commendable female protagonists. She has to have agency, but not be a guy hero in a female skin. Creating an athletic young woman who just happens to desire other women (but has a not-unheard of over-the-top taste for yaoi tales) sets her character apart from the other in-harem female characters and makes her style of direct agency more believable within the context of the tale. Besides, she was too much of a good character to waste after she had given up on beating the crap out of Araragi-kun because she was jealous of his relationship with her longtime crush Senjōgahara.
“Have you ever heard a quote that you were so sure was real? What if the first time you’d heard of that person was from that fake quote? How could you tell the fake quotes from the real quotes?”
– Slavoj Žižek
.. In a Japanese high school.
The simple mechanics of storytelling sometimes conspire with an odd conceit to create inadvertent feast for the theory hungry.
Why did the author of a relentlessly smutty old-school yuri girls’ school ecchi manga go out of his way to drop little bits of characterization, high romantic melodrama, Japanese isolationist feminist literature references and an over-the-top jealous, manipulative, possessive “bad lesbian” character (who ruins the idyllic everything- can- be- resolved- by- screwing- everybody- immediately “wa” and gets whacked with a fire extinguisher for her misbehaviour) into his otherwise simple smut-fest ??
.. In a Japanese high school.
“Do not try to re-write the blog. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.” “What truth?” “There is no blog.” “There is no blog?” “Then you’ll see that it is not the blog that you re-write, it is only yourself.” – Slavoj Žižek
.. In a Japanese high school.
Aside from a welcome antidote to romantic tales of youthful longing that take virtual angst-filled years and years for the main characters to even hold hands, a certain “sect” had the virtue of getting right to the naughty bits, followed by more naughty bits (did I mention the naughty bits?). But the characters are in no way “lesbians” or even female.. The only way to explain them as a coherent whole is to posit them as a male yuri enthusiast’s recasting of BL /yaoi character tropes into female skins, minus overt seme and uke trope clutter. Ken Kurogane’s signature work is a reworked BL grinder, written for guys.
“Did I mention we’re all going to Hell in big Chinese ovens?” – Sylvia Plath
.. In a Japanese high school.
And of course there is the elephant in the room; the odd habit of so many women to make up faux-male- homosexual characters that can play out a form of -ahem- romance, along with plenty of incomprehensibly wrong naughty stuff and never-will-issue-forth-from-the-mouths-of-actual-males romantic blather.
I just love the idea that they exist and have figured out how to ruthlessly pursue what turns their cranks.
Heck, their characters in their most advanced Japanese form of the genre disavow “official” male homosexuality, instead insisting that only mad desire for that one and only other dude has driven their characters to pine for male-ish intimacy. Here is a weird bit of cross-cultural compare and contrast: the Japanese rotten girl will adhere to the “only you” trope, while at least some of the Euroethnic slash-fen tribes will engage in endless speculation as to whether one of both of their pairing is “Bi“.
Huh? So the Archangel Gabriel is a robot cat toaster from the future that poops bus tokens. Whatever…
“I consume human soul-energy for a living, okay? It’s my job. Just shut up and let me do my job.” – Slavoj Žižek
Why do we humans go through all the bother of making up such messy and elaborate campfire stories?
“Tell me, Mr Anderson, what good is a phone call…if you are unable to speak.”
-Slavoj Žižek
I am going to add one more neato layer to the confusion surrounding the whole puppet show of odd gendered presentation in contemporary Japanese visual culture and ask about the nuances of dialogue that we, as outlanders could spend years trying to grasp, by means of this most excellent paper I stumbled across recently:
So, as proper leaching outlanders who read scanlated manga and watch fansubbed anime, we all appreciate the little touches like the honorifics, the ores and bokus,chans and kuns, even the margin notes that denote a switch to respect language/ formal language and/or the lapse into a regional accent/ Osaka-ben, etc., But after reading this it becomes painfully obvious how much we are missing.
Since we were looking at visual culture artifacts, we were paying attention to the pretty drawings, neh? Well now the cat’s outta the bag and armed with handy dictionaries and lots of useful research, we shoud probably be paying more attention to “arch” manga and anime dialogue.
I wonder how much of the “drag” that takes place in the construction of yaoi bishies and yuri girls has to do with the modes of speech/ vocabulary and dialogue that are reserved to that mode of gender-ed presentation in Japan and /or how these codes are violated for effect by the characters, for the fun and longing of their authors?
Write BL fanfiction and you get speak of love like a Yakuza tough reciting Sapphic poetry fragments.
... In a Japanese high school.
Looks like fujoshi are not just getting all squee on the parade of cartoon pretty boys and hunks and not just having fun by getting them all tangled up in “the human body can’t do that !!!” throws of passion, but also having the fun of having their puppets speak high romantic melodramatic declarations of mad desire at each other in tough-guy modes of speech that are nominally out of place for their creators..
I begin to understand how medieval Europe got its myths of chivalry, even as I lament my inability to get even the most rudimentary conversational Japanese into my brain-box.
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. I tried bolt-cutters for a while, but I kept straining my arms, so I went back to the hacksaw. And why do they keep chaining themselves up like that, anyway? Is that some weird sexual thing?” – Slavoj Zizek
It all gets really, really crunchy and tasty when we start hunting for excuses or reasons for the existence of narratives that make a fetish out of innovative “imagined others”. All of our “others” (..and our “selves” for that matter) are imagined constructs in any case, so why not eschew realism and create a bestiary of space aliens, villainous furreigners, sexpot objects of desire, powerful (though endearingly flawed) heroes, gods, demons, sidekicks, schoolgirls (and/ or school boys) vampires, otomeyaku, loli-complex afflicted bad priests, miniskirted nuns, mercenary orphans who pilot giant robots to save girls who dream of weapons from the future, flying monkeys, loaves of bread that are superheroes…
Oh crap I give up – please add your own.
Why bother with the Mary Sue Overdrive? Are we all stuck with a taste to occasionally revisit our long forgotten imaginary friends and transitional objects? Did the wiring get shorted out and enough of us “need’ our phantasy constructs to jump-start our mundane IRL desires? Isn’t this the sign of some terrible out-of-eden “fall” that we supplant fantasy for real intimacy with a real person, or are we just hunting “lurv secrets” so that we can amaze, amuse and annoy our IRL partners (when and if we have any)?
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all killers are punished, unless of course they do it in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. By the way, it is also forbidden to have sex with farm animals.” – Voltaire in conversation with Oscar Wilde (and Slavoj Zizek)
Perhaps because the long history of human fantasy has been until recently exclusively devoted toward far bloodier ends:
When W. B. Yeats wrote:
“We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love…”
…He was watching as his small patch of Irish soil was doing the local road show of “The Rites of Spring“. Like mass culture’s insane overload of pretty pictures, pleasant music and even pretty colors, the profusion of narrative available to the average citizen of 2014 CE earth dwarfs what was available to even the richest and most powerful of the past. We just have more. It makes us a bit odd. (so sez Dr. Tamaki, Toffler and John Brunner, so it’s gotta be right, neh?)
Chill out and learn to hack the spew.
“You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously you are mistaken.” – Slavoj Žižek
.
A quick glance at the news feeds reveals that we are all still enthralled with our conventional, accepted, real-life fantasies and that they still make the best excuses for mayhem, torture, neglect, oppression and murder. How else can we explain Dick Cheney? Isis? The Tea Party? Shintaro Ishihara?
“What does not kill you will hurt a lot.” – Slavoj Žižek
.. In a Japanese high school.
So three cheers for escapist reading material, Mary Sues, robot cats from the future, Hato, Madarame and Ogiue, Shinobu Handa and Shinobu Oshino Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade and Kanbaru Suruga, even cartoon rainbow-colored ponies and all the other odd and oddly gender-ed characters invented and/or admired by Alfred Prufrock and his brothers and sisters whenever the pressure at the office gets to be a real effing drag.
Gambatte Kudesai !!!
“I advise you to go on living, solely to enrage those who are paying your salary. ” – Slavoj Žižek
.. In a Japanese high school.
The best of the holiday season to everyone, and I wish you all a Happy New Year!
This all may have been said before but there is a serious problem with Cool Japan, and it is threatening my daily fix of neato contemporary Japanese culture.
Looks like a bad case of DENTSU-itis. To put it simply; any Japanese government cultural promotion initiative will be used as an excuse for one group of rich, well-connected old dinosaur pols to give billions of yen to another group of rich, well-connected old dinosaur ex-pols and fixers.
I may be mistaken here…
I am sure that the wizards at DENTSU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentsu) know their stuff when it comes to pitching the newest bright and shiny thing at the Japanese consumer. They have been doing it for decades, and they are held in almost god-like reverence for their abilities. So much so that having them as your ad agency of record conveys a mark of respectability and prestige upon whoever and whatever they get involved with. You can’t build a cathedral in medieval Europe without the Church, and you cannot run a succesful product launch in modern Japan without their imprimatur. Just look for them in the credits of your newest fave anime. If it has ambitions, they are there.
“”Dentsu’s monopoly is based on access to celebrity, not media. This works because in Japan it is aesthetic novelty, rather than hit-you-on-head ideas, that will always win out when building brands, and celebrity is the easiest way to auction novelty to the highest bidder.”” http://jameshollow.com/blog/japanese-advertising-industry-nutshell/
Except when the product is a bit odd: You cannot wreck your J-pop idol’s rep by having her pitch weird otaku crap. Besides only the hard-corest of western geeks would recognise her in any case.
I am a bad person.
I read manga on grey-zone aggregator sites. Sometimes I go to scanlator sites, but mostly I read from scummy make-cash-off-the-backs-of-scanlating-volunteers sites because they have a lot of content, and I can also shut off cookies, java-script, go to “mobile” mode and get low-res versions of my fave fix that load really really fast on my third-world internet connection. And the annoying gehhhh(!) -taste scam ads magically vanish.
My karma feels a bit dirty. Sometimes I go to Amazon.jp.co and guiltily buy something I cannot understand to ensure that the mangaka gets a few yen. Not often, sometimes.
In a perfect world, I would be reading the stuff on a “Cool Japan” site set up as a non-profit collaboration between Jp publishers that would not lock up my pathetic old pc with 19 layers of flash, and would also be serving me Jp tourism, culture, fashion and otaku crap ads; perhaps even Rakutan/ Amazon.jp sales links – with suppliers who ship to the gaijin out-lands. My hideous furreigner credit cards and Paypal account would work! Content on the site could be set up so as to allow quasi-wiki style translation corrections (niconico comment style?)
And it would make my breath smell minty fresh.
Such a site would not worry about content getting filched, because all content will always get filched anyway – so it wouldn’t take 2 hours to load each page. Instead it would just be happy to have the most, best , newest and richest content. With some savvy ad curation, no one would turn off the ads because the ads would be way kewl.
Oh, and the mangaka would get some coin from this.
Even if the content was back-stock and/or web-toon B-grade fodder, it would still be interesting.
OH SNAP! I have re-invented NAVER: pity that manwha barely clicks for me…
This kind of blue-sky rant is symptomatic of a greater paradox in Japanese (and to a growing extent global) culture: the really interesting stuff gets made in spite of, not with the help of any type of “official” encouragement.
“”Better yet, a debate is needed within Japan to improve Japanese culture on the whole, meaning: more power to women, youth, minorities and artists; less groveling to loan sharks, Keidanren, and mandarins. But any attempt to question the tenets of Japanese culture is likely to draw accusations of racism or Japan bashing. Issues about how to heal the sickness in the heart of the culture — stress, alcoholism, suicide — aren’t likely to come up during the two-week election campaign about the TPP and NPPs.”” – Christopher Johnson
The problem is not unique to Japan. The usual naive answer to this kind of complaint is the admonition to give money directly to the artists. That might work, but I suspect it would be impossible in Japan, and the “artists” would never see a yen of it.
So here is my stupid suggestion:
Give tiny tax deductions to the Genshiken(s)…
…and to the organizing committees of local merchant association festivals, ecology enthusiasts, anti-nuke advocates, “recycle” promoters, maker-geeks, Pride parades, Yabusame and re-enactor maniacs, Neet/ freeter/ homeless rights groups, multicultural committees, fringe music festivals, amateur theatre groups, car rallies and the entire oddball circus of cultural detritus that we euroethnic types take for granted on our weekends.
Or to put it in polite politico-socio-economic policy terms: support local and regional grass-roots organizations with limited tax benefits targeted towards projects and bare-bones operating expenses.
Spend your government money as diffuse tax expenditures rather than lump-sum payola.
…Now, the utter inanity of venturing free advice on Japanese tax policy, in English, on a blog about manga, from Canada is obvious. In fact it is standing behind me in the form of a 600kg troll with a severe case of body odor and really bad breath. He is laughing quietly at me, right at this moment… “Bakka gaijin! Fu! ufu! ufu!” he whispers in breathy basso tones… I blame Rachel Matt Thorn for whistling him into existence and setting him on all of fools who have “ideas” and want to complain and give free advice to Japanese folks and institutions, in English, from blogs on anime and manga, written in… And I know Rachel Matt Thorn is right about this. I could stop now and he would vanish.. Nevertheless…
Despite this, local grass-roots Japanese culture flourishes because small voluntary groups, with the support of local businesses and individuals come together year after year and put on events. For the gaijin manga/ game/ anime fan, the most famous of these is the Comic Market, or comike/comiket.
You cannot make a tax-deductible donation to Comiket.
Its organizational structure is a bit byzantine. Even though it is supported/ sustained by a non-profit organization that keeps it from disintegrating between conventions, supporters keep them going without any expectation of a tax write-off. Comiket gets by with oodles of volunteers and a few fundraising side-ventures – finding a home for overstock dojins and printing the massive convention catalogues.
All those fun local matsuri and festivals? Arranged and supported through local business groups, ad-hoc do- gooder committees, shrines and temples. Zero tax expenditure for the central government. Perhaps some free office space from local governments, but don’t hold your breath.
Contemporary Japanese social realities work against changing this. Those that already do anything of note do so without help; so why should the taxpayer fund loser dogs? Any change would also risk giving tax money to yakuza, cults, right-wing crazies, pyramid scammers, wacky fringe political parties and North Korean sympathizers.
In the end, it is easier to give a train-load of cash to the conservative old-boy network of ad agencies and golden parachute study groups and let them run a telephone poll and a few expensive celebrity commercials. Stability is guaranteed; effectiveness occurs only as a happy accident.
That the Japanese consumer will make polite, outward noises of approval – for at least the first two days – out of a sense of cultural solidarity and good manners is part of the symptom and not evidence of any economic recovery. The captain on the B-Ark doesn’t have to do much.
“Unless of course,” he said softly, “they were eaten by the goat …”
I know this sounds like Euroethnic old-boy making easy blanket prescriptions for things he doesn’t understand, but can it be that hard to try it? Give a few yen to stuff that already works, so that it doesn’t die.
You could probably get a bunch of grad students together and design a new class of micro-charitable organizations in one semester. Something that could issue capped charitable donations for several limited classes of “cultural events”. Restrictions could be placed on office rent, salaries, administrative expenses, contracted services, etc. to make sure the cash goes to the festival and not into some scumbag’s pocket.
The size and number of donations that could be issued per year could be limited. Audits, boards, general elections, transparency, peer review, yadda yadda yadda could keep the system clean. Plenty of fine bureaucrat jobs there too. Someone from head office has to go to the matsuri to make sure it hasn’t turned into a fiasco. Japan has accountants. Time to use them for goodness instead of boringness – or at least use the boringness for goodness.
The trick would be to design the program so that you get a slew of new teeny tiny local events and relatively few scams. It could be messy, at least at first. One could be unfair and require a one or two year unfunded track record prior to approval, affiliation with a “responsible” organization, and all manner of other nudge nudge wink wink to keep the boat from rocking during too much during the shakeout phase.
The aim of the program would be to give a tiny leg up to all the grass-roots enthusiast events that already take place all over Japan, and that are under strain from a lousy economy, ageing population and a mounting general feeling of irrelevance and despair.
If the “Deep State” really wants to co-opt the freak fringe, nothing co-ops better than a 47 page annual charitable status/ grant report requiring audited financial statements and power-point presentations of last year’s activities, along with a three year membership-derived statement of goals and projected future deliverables. Great practice for the real world – even for University manga club members.
All across Japan, hundreds of thousands of young (and young at heart) enthusiasts struggle every year to put on shoestring events with popcorn budgets that do not even allow them to rent a storage locker to stash tables and tents from previous year’s events.
Similar simple problems with basic enabling infrastructure; a place to meet, funds for local licenses and event permits/ insurance, hall rentals and the like make each and every one of their events an epic labor of love. Their burdens could be eased a bit.
Near Kamakura, a yearly event with movies, Dj’s and skateboards – completely grass roots and local!
This would go a long way to ensure that a future Cool Japan initiatives have something to pitch, besides a few token high fashion reinterpretations of Harajuku street fashion from 4 years ago and Hello Kitty.
It all might break down if your matsuri is full of risqué cosplay, dojins featuring tentacle pron, loli smut, hard yaoi and lewd josou games. Then again, Flash Art grade international high church art can sometimes feature imagery that would make a hentai mangaka vomit. Gummint and big business attention might be the last thing the organizers want. Would the copyright holders step in and shut down %85 of a cosplay event? Would the massive and much feared Oricon cabal usurp all the live music festivals and fill them with processed cheese bands?
And what the heck am I thinking, making sweeping pronouncements about what the Japanese people and their government should do with their tax code? In a manga und oddball theory blog, no less? Who in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is going to read this and care a whit? Silly Rabbit! Do you actually think that anyone from Japan reads this thing? And yet…
You cannot make a tax-deductible donation to Comiket. (!!!)
A lousy tax deduction for Japanese people to support what they love and what already does so much for them: I know they already support it and will continue to do so without such official encouragement; still the absence of even the modest incentive and acknowledgement of the importance of a wider civil society saddens me.
It is not like I am sitting on my isolated little furreigner mountaintop and yelling that the entire Japanese gummint should scrap their tax code and budgeting process in favour of a Jack Halderman experiement. It’s just that…
You cannot make a tax-deductible donation to Comiket. (I stop noaw…)
I doubt that Comiket would directly take Deep State coin, but you still could do a few neat things with such a system. While the main benefits would be an encouragement of local grass-roots Japanese culture for the japanese consumer/ fan, there would eventually be marketable foreign-interest spinoffs.
I am reading my latest fun find on manga.jp.org. I have the language selection toggled to English, but I note that French, Spanish and German scripts are also available. Or I can toggle back to Japanese, which changes the “flag translation” window entry section below the screen. As I am neither practicing my Japanese or my English I generally don’t visit here often, I can flag a real clunky bit of dialogue from the English page.
I have signed up for a basic membership so I can vote some of my monthly membership credits to a mangaka whose product I really really like. One of the publishers or advertisers on the site will then contribute a few yen to a non-profit charity affiliated with Comiket that will make a grant towards the dojin publishing expenses or/or table fee for that mangaka, so that they can show up with their circle and commune with their fans. The supporting Japanese company gets a tax credit, up to certain limits. Or the contribution can go towards a travel fund so that the mangaka can do a book/ convention tour at a regional Japanese convention or even in far-off lands. My leecher-guilt is soothed, even as I worry that perhaps the sponsors are gaming the voting system. At least the mangakas all get a ridiculously low basic residual rate for having their works up on the site.
I can buy more credits through a premium membership or earn them through fannish participation and site grunt work. I wish I could translate, but reviews earn me a few credits as well, as long as they are judged useful and I don’t rile the moderators by trying to snooker the system.
While reading, I am occasionally tempted by ad links for related products on Rakutan, and notice that since I am reading a manga that supposedly takes place near Kamakura, that there is a link to tourism site promoting upcoming Kamakura events: a Rockabilly festival and two traditional matsuri taking place in the area in the next few months. Perhaps I should click-through to see what the January schedule holds? At least I am not reading Shoujo manga. If I did that I would be deluged with sugary fashion ads. If I want ultra girly kawaii hyno-swirl contact lenses (Halloween approacheth) I at least know that the supplier will probably take my Paypal or credit card and ship to me as long as I am not in a “difficult” location.
Wow, there’s a hot-spring tour package that can accommodate my strange alien nekkidness and possibly one or two discrete tats (Tattooed barbarian days are Tuesdays and Wednesdays during the summer). And lookie: the mystery grab-bag of used yukata; fabric re-use grade, two kilos shipped sea-mail (slow, no tracking) for $30! I always get that ad when I am reading Gintama, along with the cheesy wooden sword ads…
A silly fantasy: Japanese retailers find foreign buyers incomprehensible and would never waste time marketing to them. Until they find that they can make a decent profit from the exercise.
Or until the Koreans and or the Chinese show them how it can be done.
“So now that we’ve established that it’s okay as long as they look like girls, can someone recommend me some really good doujin?”
– Slavoj Žižek (on discovering an otokonoko thread on 4chan’s /a board)
As class-S girl-crush romance and fujoshi desire became the two main (and sometimes competing) enthusiasms available to young Japanese women in search of a safe venue for a bit of “getting out of hand“, the otokonoko/ josou genre appears to have found a complementary place in the hearts of male otaku, over-taking an earlier fascination with loli moe-blobs – first in Japan and then across the globe. Correspondents have noted that I have missed more than a few milestone manga, anime and games in the genre and even in its related manifestations in 3D hobbies. Well, I’m sure they will pop up when and if I am ready for them. Ain’t modern Japanese culture wonderful?
Oh brave new world that hath such creatures in it!
One thing that makes trap-genre josou genre (per previous, best to eschew the use of the insulting vernacular term) more attractive to the average otaku (Japanese or diaspora) is that the otokonoko avoids, or at least displaces the problems of the loli genre (though there appears to be significant bleed between the two). By “bringing home” their edgy, transgressive fantasies to a male-exclusive realm that is also further removed from 3D real-world correspondence, the otaku can at least push back the lurking shadows of “a certain bear“. According to the essay at Girl Comics (http://8c.dasaku.net/?p=96) (now wiped -try The Archive) the genre is fairly new: the example discussed developing out of a failed yaoi effort in 2006.
Real-life 3D members of the trans community find the genre obnoxious and insulting as all heck, but most pornography insults and offends some one. No offensiveness, no thrill. Some western fans play the bonus rounds in the shock and offend game like a pro sport, as can be seen in a sampling of the comments from recent otokonoko threads on 4chan’s notorious /a/ board:
>It’s not gay if they look like girls.
>It’s a girl penis. Plain and simple. Nothin’ gay about that.
>We haven’t derailed into discussing thermodynamics or convincing another Anon to have a threeway with a bunch of senior citizens. We’re getting there.
>How can you tell she loves you if she doesn’t have a raging foot long erection?
>So now that we’ve established that it’s okay as long as they look like girls, can someone recommend me some really good doujin?
>I never got the point of having this argument. Can’t you just fap to what you want? This is /a/, no one is going to give a shit if you’re gay or not.
>You still feel bad afterwards though. Also, it’s not gay if you wouldn’t do it in real life.
>Apparently your fetishes and what you wank it off to has to be labeled straight or gay.
>It’s because it disinters the repressed sexual urges you have for your mother.
>Oh fuck, no wonder. Thanks, Sigmund!
>Look it’s not gay to fap to girls with dicks, alright. You’re just fantasising about something feminine that has a little bit extra, nothing wrong there. It’s massively homo to think about sucking and getting fucked by said dicks though, and I’m way past that point already.
>But you’re still attracted to girls in real life, right? Right?
>Hey, anons. When it’s wearing a dress, it’s a girl.
>I want to fuck Rui’s boypussy!
>You want to fuck a tranny? gross!
>I think he’s cuter like that. No homo.
>It’s still gross but boypussies and dicks are way more pure than pussypussies.
>Where the fuck do you think you are? How do you accidentally stumble into /a/?
>It’s too late for me Anon, save yourself now.
>I can’t choose between yuri and girly boys, it’s too difficult.
>I bet you fags look at the tags before you fap.
>lol that’s such a profound statement I’m tempted to screencap your post for future re-posting.
>Girls can have penises, idiot. That’s how the manga makers draw them. It would be gay otherwise but it’s not. Female body + dick = female!
>Besides, feminine dicks are the best kinds of dicks.
>Get out of here you twink!
>Traps=/y/
>Traps have never been /y/, and /a/ has been gay for traps since before it was /a/.
>Degenerate you can’t even make your sexuality public without being hated.
>I like being hated.
>Do you read trap material because you want to fuck traps, or because you want to be the trap?
>This really is the best birthday ever. It’s not actually my birthday.
Vox populi, vox dei. /a/ is of course the general anime forum, /y/ is the yaoi forum.
There is an art to the anonymous postings of 4chan and when a good run of shocking, provocative trolling and witty repartee gets going, folks are going to favor style over substance. Still the point is made, without dropping in a whole lot of critical theory speak about gender fluidity. Once again, the boys are busy making up new ideas about the feminine: they wouldn’t be hanging out on 4chan on a Saturday night if they had other things to do, n’est ce pas?
One has to stay focused when trying to tease some understanding from otokonoko genre’s popularity. Like the yaoi bishie, %100 pure genre otokonoko are a fantasy toy made up of the desires of their creators and -more importantly- devoid of the problematic aspects of the genders that were blendered to make them up. It would be a mistake, or at least distracting to let them slide into more realistic or even dramatic depictions of trans-like folk. Kio Shimoku might be dropping the tropes into Genshiken, but Hato-chan is not one. He is crossdressing, he may be edging towards some position within a trans* continuum, but he is not a fan-service ZOMG, panchu-with-bulge, all the boys want him no matter because he is so cute character – yet! I will stick with otomeyaku. Like Dr Tamaki’s Beautiful Fighting Girl, otokonoko spring into existence with little back story or reason to exist beyond their stated purpose. I would be surprised if there wasn’t already a few cross-overs from last decade’s fave otaku fixation to give us the Beautiful Fighting Otokonoko. If this sounds too Azuma-database-ish, remember that while the sentence grows more elaborate with a new vocabulary, the desires expressed remain within the same neighborhood.
Too cute to be a girl
After 400 high-school eroge dating sims, with obligatory harem bonus arcs after clearing all the characters, the thrill of a fantasy of dragging a bunch of lovestruck, wide-eyed moe-blob lolis off to the yurt must pale.
In the Genshiken-verse, Kio Shimoku has been sneaking in otokonoko genre tropes as a counterpoint to the fujoshi girls’ level up of pervy fantasy material. Simple loli dojins just aren’t going to cut it anymore. Quaint loli smut is for funny smelling old men. He has even dropped in Risa with her nasty tastes. Both Madarame and Kuchiki seem to be conversant with this new, even more obscene otaku fixation, and thanks to Kousaka’s company’s josou game, it is now lose in the story line.
Plot mojo, as always comes from the extreme liminality of the Hato character. Once determined to ship himself as a BL seme with Madarame as uke, he now seems to be trying to interest Madarame in Hato-chan as a real-life otokonoko. No “trapping” or even josou-game outfits are needed: everything is above-board, fair and in the open, but Hato has a secret weapon!
The “I could take care of that for him” fugue moment has now been replaced with Hato-as-chan trying to out-feminine the girls (set your goals at an attainable level) of the Genshiken.
In the yet to be translated Chapter 98, Hato-chan, chaperoned by Sue, cooks up a meal for the ailing Madarame at his flat. Behold the Genshiken Nadeshiko in full flower. Even Keiko the hostess couldn’t be as accommodating, and she definitely wouldn’t make house calls! Waughh! Too domestic! I wish I could make out exactly how Sue is over- reacting.
What is Kio Shimoku doing?
Perhaps he is finally getting bored with the Genshiken opus: Hato will go full trans- fujoshi- I’m- only- gay- for- you and glomp onto Mada, and after lots of mutual blushing, the happy couple will stroll off into the sunset and the series will end. Much fan rage to ensue.
I don’t buy it. For one thing, throwing away the comedic possibilities of even such a simple ending is like throwing away a bag of money.
Drawing is easy, comedy is hard.
Oh Fuck it! Engage play-set field !!!
Hato comes out as -chan on campus and the stuco boys make life difficult for the Genshiken. He seeks the help of the campus LGBTQ association, only to find that they do not share his view that otokonoko-fujoshi has a place in the queer spectrum. Hijinx ensue.
Hato comes is caught changing on campus by the stuco boys who threaten to make life difficult for the Genshiken unless Hato-as-chan joins the student government. Hijinx ensue.
As a new member of the stuco, Hato-chan has to go around to all the clubs and ensure their activities are in line with regulations. She begins to take notes on the various dramas and unrequited romances taking place, while Mada tags along. She uses her notes as materials for steamy BL dojins, all while being completely unaware that Madarame has developed strong feelings for her. Hijinx ensue
In an attempt to cut down on make-up time, Hato adopts a short-haired butch look while on-campus. Most of the student body, including the stuco boys think he is a girl crossdressing as a boy. Some find out the truth and are still smitten. With Risa and the rest of the fujoshi crew they run a Host Club as part of the school festival. Hijinx ensue.
Hato-chan decides that she needs official gender reassignment status and goes to Dr. Saito Tamaki’s clinic (or thinly veiled manga-verse analogue thereof) to try to persuade him that Fujoshi is a gender. Hijinx ensue.
Ogiue suddenly lands two separate manga contracts for monthly serialization and is overwhelmed. She hires all the current Genshiken members as part-time assistants and with coaching Hato gets better at drawing stories, rather than sex scenes; but they are still shorthanded. One afternoon whle taking a break in a nearby park, Ogiue, Hato, Yajima and Rika come across a drunk woman asleep on a park bench. By amazing coincidence it turns out to be Narumi- sensei, the only teacher at Ogiues high school who supported her (also a closetted fujoshi). Waking her up they hear her tale of woe; jilted, unemployed, about to be kicked out of her apartment. Ogiue decides to hire her as an assistant. Of course she is useless at production, though she cooks well. There is no room at Ogiue’s, so Hato is pressed into letting her freeload in his cramped apartment. Hijinx ensue.
A homicidal terrorist shows up on campus piloting a 40ft high mecha. Sue is revealed to be part of a world-wide mercenary force and de-cloaks her nearby parked mecha but is too distracted by Hato and Mada to be able to raise her psi-linked shields. Meanwhile the villain keeps insisting that Hato-chan is his “honey!”, and refers to Hato as “Kashim” between singing Schubert’s Ave Maria and smashing buildings. Mayhem ensues.
It turns out that Madarame made a pact with Satan-chan so that a cute girl would take his virginity, only… Hijinx ensue. In fact the entire moteki field effect is a demonic spell, but Madarame’s soul will never be collected. More hijinx…
Hato-chan convinces Madarame that she truly loves him and only him, but Mada can’t handle the idea of 3D intimacy, so they only exchange drool. Hijinx ensue.
Hato convinces Mada to go off with him on a three-week vacation to rural Japan, where they spend the time walking through the countryside, eating good wholesome food and making friends with interesting happy locals. Nothing much else happens. Fans cry Iyashikei and go into rage mode.
Hato will drop out of University and get a job teaching at an exclusive girl’s school, but has to crossdress in order to keep the job. Hijinx ensue.
Madarame rejects Hato-chan, who then decides that she will move to Spain and learn bullfighting, so as to die in the ring. Small dead bulls ensue.
Hato eventually confesses to Mada and in a moment of alcohol fueled passion
they attempt intimacy. What follows is the clumsiest, most inept attempt at
man-love ever. Both are too embarassed to try anything further or even talk
much to each other after. Years pass, Japan’s economy gets worse. Mada messed up his career and a marriage, Hato decided he really was gay and liked crossdressing, but has had a hard life of it. They meet again, both homeless they hang out together, sometimes with a snotty self distructive street kid girl who reminds them a bit of Ogiue, back in better days. On Christmas eve, Hato- chan finds a baby in a dumpster. Redemption ensues.
Hato inherits a crumbling old-style rooming house near the University from a long-lost uncle and decides to run it as miss landlady. The fujoshi crew moves in and then Madarame shows up with a 6 year-old daughter, apparently the result of a long-suppressed/ forgotten sexual assault by a beautiful, strong, high-school yankee girl. Heartwarming Ikumen story ensues.
Madarame almost gets killed when he unexpectedly runs into Saki fighting with scary cosplayers. Near death, he is revived by drinking some of Saki’s blood: it turns out that Saki is so worldly because she is a 400 year old loli vampire. Despite newly gained super powers, Madarame remains incredibly uncoordinated and Hato must tag along on Mada’s patrols to give him martial arts lessons. Hato cannot decide whether he should be Mada’s male friend or a cute girl. Hijinx ensue.
Hato-chan goes to a Slavoj Zizek conference at a neighboring university and a terrorist bomb goes off. She falls, hits her head and revives a few moments later to see a wall about to collapse on the famous philosopher. Suddenly aware that she can remember her past lives and that she knows magic, she invokes a teleportation spell. Zizek disappears.
She then remembers more of her past lives and realizes that Zizek was sent to a parallel world where he ended up restored to his youth, apprenticed to a wizard, succeeding the wizard, dying of old age, being reincarnated- with- full- past- lives- memories as a powerful witch, dying again after mucking about with a powerful magic artifact and being reborn back in Japan as Hato. Hato-chan now gets to be a magical girl and the reincarnation of the world’s most grumpy, media-savvy Hegelian philosopher. Hijinx and bad philosophy jokes ensue.
Hato is invited by Madarame to spend a few weeks in a hill town near Kyoto with distant relatives – who turn out to be very conservative and suspicious horse breeders. They are also devotees of the traditional Shinto ritual of mounted archery – Yabusame. Due to a lack of young men interested in the sport, the nearby girl’s college has been re-training their equestrian team as cross-dressing archers for an upcoming festival, but one of the girls has taken a bad fall, injuring herself. Hato insists that he know how to ride, and can learn enough archery in time for the festival, and can cross-cross-dress to blend in, but the club captain and Mada’s uncle and aunt prohibit him from doing anything more than acting as a groom for the horses. Uncle and aunt remain very suspicious and are sure that he will try to sneak in some riding practice instead of just minding the horses- especially the most high-spirited and unpredictable horse on the ranch, the horse that threw the team captain’s friend, nicknamed “Dirty”.
One afternoon Hato is out in the field, cross- cross- dressed as a girl, dressing as a medieval horse groom boy, horse minding with Mada – who just sits under a tree reading manga. Hato gets bored and notices a big old tractor tire in the field. Dirty is just eating grass and waving its tail at flies. Hato up-ends the tire and climbs inside. The tire starts moving – the field isn’t flat. Can’t stop. Madarame starts shouting and chasing after Hato in the tire. Auntie and Uncle run outside to check on what the commotion is. They see him rollin’…. They hatin’…. Patrolling… Trying to catch Hato riding Dirty.
Must stop now… Hope someone posts a ch98 synopsis real soon… Whew! Thanks! I was about to add something that involved Hato, Madarame and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
“I’ve seen your face before my friend. But I don’t know if you know who I am.” – Slavoj Žižek
A funny thing happened back in January in the world of Japanese TV commercials (CMs/ Commercial Messages). All Nippon Airways tried a bit of subtle po-mo humour and a few noses bent themselves out of joint. Much ado was made about it, especially in certain regions of the blogosphere and then the ad was pulled. But no one chased the trope reference completely to its burrow.
Allow me to venture a small suggestion:
Some folks would argue that the orphan “Hafu” lolicon pervert Nicchi, of “The Otaku’s Daughter” (Otaku no Musume-san) is a generic gaijin clown character in any case, but then one must recall his odd back story (again full of quasi-xenophobic tropes, taken to ludicrous extremes – the ninja xtian cult, the sugar fix to calm him down, the fact that “the mother” originally lusted for him, rather than Kouta, etc, etc., ) Within the confines of the narrative, even Nicchi gets calmed down, humanized and finally assimilated.
No sense of humor at all… jeesh! Then again if it had got out that ANA’s ad agency was suggesting that all Caucasian furreigners are fashioned from the mold of a ninja cult-christian pedophile it might have made the controversy even worse.
We would never do something that silly…
Would we?
Not very convincing, Mr Bond!
Whoooops!
I am thinking about it.. fast, even
Nawww…
Just plain fail-trolling, desu…
Ok; that last one really doesn’t count…
While off in Japan, I had a few moments to sit around in front of my laptop and enjoy some extremely fast internet, wiggle around certain aggregator sites’ lame attempts to make it appear that they take down scanlated manga when it is licensed (naww, they just block Jp IP’s with a “sorry it be licensed notice – use a proxy, like the one built into Torch ) and generally try to deepen my distorted understanding of current Japanese society. I didn’t indulge in too much of this kind of nonsense because she- who- up-with-me- puts would remind me that I better not have traveled half way around the world to hiki out in her apartment( I got to see an honest to goodnees full Noh play! wow!).
Nevertheless, and while I claim no particular brilliant insights, a theme or two began to sneak up on me:
The Otaku’s burden:
What with all the Abe-administration X China X South Korea fuss, and the off-noted political rightward drift in Japan, (and the right-wing echo chambers on some 2-chan boards) could manga like Gate – Jietai Kare no Chi nite, Kaku Tatakeri have a bit more zeitgeist stuck onto them than previously thought?
There are other manga efforts that play the neo-colonialism card in a similar, but less aggressive way, such as Outbreak Company: Moeru Shinryakusha
In the past when Japanese manga readers wanted a rip-roaring shoot-em-up fest, the tendency was to displace it to lawless exotic locales (Black Lagoon / ブラック・ラグーン), use exotic international characters and locales (Jormungand ヨルムンガンド) alternate time-lines (Full Metal Panic! フルメタル·パニック!) and the like.
The only time the JSDF seemed to make an appearance was in its alternate secret incarnation as the JAGDF . Looks like the times call for a bit more overt jingoism:
Fuck the prime directive!
.
While them evil, slaving, raping, Machiavellian fantasy empire aristocrats are supposed to evoke imperial Rome, a la “I Claudius“, don’t they look a tad “Republican” as in WASP?
power derives from…
.
.
.
Ok, one really shouldn’t read too much into a simple adventure fantasy manga. Its yankee grandpa, Stargate SG-1 is pure US military propaganda too – there is something seductively cathartic about mowing down G’aould and Wraith baddies with heavy ordnance – and there is no reason why the Japanese reader shouldn’t get to enjoy the fun. I admit it; I have atavistic urges in my tastes for recreational reading, and judging from some of the marginalia by the various scangroups who are translating Gate, the urge to gleeful, obnoxious excess can be hard to contain. ( I assume they be trolling, patrolling… they couldn’t possibly…)
But when you start reading some of the reporting on the drift right-ward in Japanese politics – beyond shrine visits and “slight revisions” to article 9 of the constitution, things get a bit alarming. Looks like the neighbourhood has become a bit more dangerous of late and folks is getting antsy…
Then again, some online journals do run to the left of the political spectrum:
One also gets the feeling that some of the voices on the left should tone it down a bit too, lest they get a bit too apologetic towards Chinese and South Korean right-wing trolls. Chomsky.. Gehhhhh!
Nowhere in Japan did I run into any foaming-at-the-mouth right wingers this time around. The only sound trucks I heard were trolling for old appliances and scrap metal. It was 5 years ago that I ran into the nationalist megaphone brigade, one Sunday afternoon in Tokyo’s Jimbochu district (Hi! I am illiterate, and everything is closed but pr0n video shops). Perhaps the presence of one uniformed police officer kept them from growling in my direction, or perhaps I was not on their furreigner-de-jour menu. Whatever; I have never really felt threatened in Japan. No right-wing beat cop has ever bothered me for my passport or implied that my used granny bike was bought off the back of a truck. Folks even sit next to me on crowded trains – especially if I am half asleep. (these three tropes seem to be the fave complaints of irked expat English teachers in the blogosphere). Most folks are more worried about getting on with their lives, the impending sales tax rise, the ossification of the political system and the graying of the population. It would be sad if the nationalistic loony fringe in Japan, China and S. Korea escalated the feedback chorus to the point where things got ugly on the ground, but I don’t think the majority of the Japanese public is anywhere near convinced.
That ANA commercial was probably trying to be all post-modernist self-mocking about it all. Perhaps they anticipated the whole kerfuffle as an “as- long-as-you- spell- my- name- right” gambit.
Inscrutable…
What would mass culture be without a bit o’ trolling?
Trolling is nothing more or less than an abbreviated urge towards fan-fiction.
Addendum:
“The facile trick of mis-attributing spurious quotes to one historical figure or another, such as “Oscar Wilde” betrays a deeper melancholy within the displaced desires that manifest through our disconnected virtual discourse. […] Virtual reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the “Real” – in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one… [..] What this means is that the discourse of the Web is thoroughly mystifying, concealing its true foundation, obfuscating the un-freedom on which it relies. In such, and as antidote to this “gravitational pull”, I propose that all such mis-attributed quotes must henceforth be attributed to me or Jacques Lacan…” On the melancholy of making up Oscar Wilde quotes – Slavoj Žižek
“Slash is usually written by straight women, yes, and I think it appeals to straight women in the same way lesbian sequences in commercial pornography appeal to straight men. I always say that if gay men and women didn’t exist, straight men and women would have had to invent us.”
– Samuel R Delany
The tone of the Genshiken has shifted a bit since the Nidiame anime ended. Once again, it has gone into full Hato-focused-mode, with the fallout from his (less occasionally now her) yaoi-inspired man-crush on Madarame dragging the plot along. Those who were getting annoyed at all the “gay stuff” slowly wrecking their beloved Genshiken are going to be even more annoyed. Oh ye of little faith!
If Genshiken was that easy Mada would already be hitched up with Keiko, Yajima would be jumping Hato to try to stop him to stop hanging out in Ni-chōme and Sue would be trying to jump Ogiue every chance she got.
Something else is going on.
but first, a small aside about scripts and scanlations…
Even though the wait for Chapters 93 and 94 had me sweating, I swear I will wait through 4 months of drought should the successor to the bringer of light ever vanish into the ether before I start google-xlating and posting scripts from Bulgarian scanlations. We poor mortals just don’t know. We have no idea if the big K dropped more napalm, or someone got real-life busy, or just bored with the whole thing. I do not regret the scripts – at least I now know that a backup can be cobbled together. I found two other independent attempts, so I know that I wasn’t the only one who got withdrawal symptoms. But the current stuff is damn finely-crafted and well-done; it would take a year or more to ramp up a group effort to replace it.
We love and respect your work, please don’t leave us without our fix, waughhh!
One thing that I came away with from the script exercise: a foreign language reader dropped a comment thanking me for providing a summary in an easy-to-google-xlate text format. I think it should be best practice for all scanlation groups to release text format scripts along with their scans, so as to share the goodness across the gulfs of language, across the entire globe, a federation of leeching fans, going forward, into a brighter future…
Ok, back to some serious mulling-over the last two chapters. Spoiler lamp is ON
At first glimpse, the two chapters are simple and flow in a straightforward manner: only closer examination shows the staging genius of Kio Shimoku. It all comes together so naturally! In chapter 93, Madarame is stuck over the holidays in his messy apartment, alone and bereft of any harem. The absence of any follow-up by any of the four is disheartening. And his broken wrist hurts. When he finally gets a visit, it is from Rika and Yajima, or Rika with Yajima present to ensure that Rika doesn’t go off the rails. He soon learns that a truce agreement is in place and that there will be no visits from any of the interested parties. 3D lurv: Don’t buy the hype! The flashback to the old boys hanging out with him immediately after comiket also had a great feeling of authenticity to it, loaded with sympathetic guy-ish grumbling and rude allusions.
Rika makes a few rude allusions too; both the boys and girls of Genshiken expect that their pr0n habit will be messy, but she quickly gets down to delivering her report and her ideas about the situation. In doing so, she assumes the voice of a great number of Genshiken fans (I posit that Japanese fans somewhat mirror diaspora opinions) and advances the suggestion that Keiko is the best choice for Madarame. Keiko is somewhat Saki-ish, riajuu, and available. She also is not Sue (our idol) or Hato-chan (our friend). Madarame can take that however he cares to – he is being gently put in his place, and that place is on the periphery of the current Genshiken.
No mention or thought of how uncomfortable it would be for Madarame to date Sas’s kid sister.
Madarame then wonders why she wasn’t pushing for Hato and gets a flood of goggle-inspired too-much-information before being told that it is really not the gang’s decision to make. Whatever Hato (as chan or kun) decides, they will support. Serves you right Mada for playing the “I’m passive I can’t decide” card.
Meanwhile in the snowy regions of Western Japan, Hato gets to face Kaminaga as his soon to be sister-in-law, in full sister-in-law-to-be mode. She is really getting into her new role. She has dyed her hair back to black, makes polite noises to the household, and gets the sudden urge to be all sisterly-supportive toward Hato even while scouting out his BL stash. Yup, here is an arch-fujoshi asshole completely reformed… Now pull the other one, it has bells on it.
Hato does manage to voice a bit of resentment towards her past behaviour, but for the most part is too troubled over what to do with his developing feelings for Madarame to really care about what Kaminaga is up to in her new oddly concerned guise. Kaminaga tries a gambit; get Kono and the other friend, Fuji(?) to meet up with Hato at a local restaurant. The results are uncomfortable. Kono doesn’t know what to do with her old feelings, and gets a bit creeped out when Hato starts going on about skin moisturization. Nor can she make the jump and discuss BL with a guy, which is the god/author setup moment Hato was waiting for: “See! I had to crossdress to be accepted!”
He also calls them his friends who he can talk with – which is so odd that I wonder if heavy irony was intended. These are the small-town fujoshi who turned his high school years into a lonely hell. And the meet-up is obviously some kind of poorly lashed together “How far gone is he? Is he still interested in girls?” exploration session. Friends like these, yup…
For all of it though, He does get some salvageable advice. Part of the Genshiken slice of life charm is the sheer amount of well-meaning, but not too useful “help” offered from all and sundry, from their own vested interest positions. Occasionally even a blind pig gets to find a truffle. Kono blurts out that if his hobby is causing him so much distress, then ditch it – it’s just a hobby. Of course her advice is tainted by self-interest, the Hato she still harbours a crush for is riajuu – but it gets him thinking.
Of course he will go back to Tokyo. Small town life is small and there isn’t a lot left for him there, though it felt good to clear the snow from the roof.
If Kono has any sense of occasion she had best run her ass over to the train station before he leaves and at least plead a copy of his next dojin from him. She can even say that the culture festival work was BETTER than Kaminaga’s stuff. C’mon, Kono, lets see some wiles!
As to why what he is returning to in Tokyo, that too deserves a bit more consideration.
A few choice bits:
Oh yes, he does blame Kaminaga for his current dilemma, but is it the original one or the original, plus the stands that have been tormenting him? Or both, plus the Kaminaga he fixated on back in high school? Was it a crush or just severely overblown admiration? When Hato calls someone sempai, what demons lurk within his private meaning of the term? Really she’s not that responsible, unless a younger evil-genius Kaminaga had ran around their junior high school leaving yaoi dojins in the boys locker rooms in the hope of livening up her small town life.
To a certain segment of Genshiken fans, and a larger number of casual readers, Hato was always latent, and now has gone gay. But what an odd and tentative homosexuality it is. Were he a real-life individual, he would be free to explore his desire as he saw fit, and would end up somewhere within the fine gradations of however wherever’s gay culture so gradates. He would have a bit of a hard time at first, but any group eventually socialises newbies. Perhaps real Japanese gay communities have their own internal arguments about what to do with “another kid from the sticks who thinks he wants to do yaoi, as a seme”. There is way too much BL and Yaoi floating around Japan.
Hato however is a character, so what exactly is he being constructed as – what is the odd version of “gay” desire being created, and why?
Hato was never a “simple” male fudanshi leaning towards 3D man-love; he always compartmentalized his yaoi fantasies within the persona of a heterosexual, celibate, fujoshi. Hato-chan was supposed to be safely “in charge” of that stuff, viacariously shipping Hato-kun as a forceful seme, but that reality never threatened the “real” male Hato, because fujoshis just do fantasies. But now “someone” wants to set 3D fujoshi Hato-chan up with a 3D Madarame as a nice, deferring, lovestruck, passive shoujo heroine, or at least as otomeyaku. Who is processing that fantasy? Which Hato is it coming from?
“Enomoto explains that “male fans cannot experience moe until they have fixed their own position”— an observation that may well have validity beyond otaku and yaoi fans. In general a man fears the undermining of his own subject position, and he must establish that position firmly before he can desire an object. This is probably the fate of all who possess a phallus (as distinct from a penis): if the position and orientation of the phallus is not defined, the male cannot face even the object of his own desire.”
– Otaku Sexuality by Saitō Tamaki (Translated by Christopher Bolton, Introduction by Kotani Mari) In “Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams : Japanese science fiction from origins to anime” – Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, editors. pps 222-249.
Kio Shimoku’s supportive cast of Genshiken characters bypass any simple questions of persecution (that’s left to small town high schools out in the snowy boonies) but if this was an attempt at a gay male coming of age story, then where are the beta couples, supportive (or predatory) older experienced gay guy(s), and a host of other tropes that I will transpose from non-exploitative “feels” yuri, having no idea how the bara genre handles this stuff when it is not getting down to raw nasty smut. Then there is his crossdressing…
Hato’s emergent pseudo-gayness is a thought experiment as to what might happen if an isolated small-town male used yaoi and BL tropes as a guide to “becoming” gay and/or trans, taken to extremes to be-labor a point and spin a fine tale. I have gone on previously that Shimoku might be pulling fast one on Saito Tamaki’s idea of hysterical trauma, with yaoi instead of the Beautiful Fighting Girl. And of course there is Dr. Mizoguchi… The results are going to odd. This stuff was generated by mostly straight women for their own amusement, and the studies surrounding it and it’s western counterparts are full of warnings from real guys who like guys that the wimmins are off on their own tangent. Plus the chief puppet-master of this tale is a guy, riffing on these contradictions.
As slash-kami MJJ reported a decade ago, her gay male correspondants would tell her: “real guys don’t fuck like that!”
Sorry Chip, you think we didn’t anyway?
“I know where I came from – but where did all you zombies come from? “I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once–and you all went away. So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light. You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me –Jane– here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully!”
-Oscar Wilde
“…to posit a gender, a God is necessary: guaranteeing the infinite.”
– Luce Irigaray
Who “owns” the popular construction of the ideas behind romance, love, sexuality and desire in modern societies? How is the territory staked out? What are the effects of the ways in which these are advanced? What happens when consensus is replaced by contested spaces? Is it all too complex for mere mortals to handle? Will society fall apart as a result?
No wonder the gender theory brigade are thick as thieves all over modern Japanese fujoshi cultural practices. I know something of the allure of this kind of raw sociology. I am lucky I have no vested interest in it or I would soon go all mad-boy about the whole thing and start Mwwwahhahhaahaa-ing all over this blog. Sociology taken too far has much of the same mirage-like appeal found in conspiracy theories. Hermetic knowledge! Power! Influence! The possibility of messing around with entire cultures! Wheeeeeee! Instead I watch from the sidelines, bemused…
Back to the Genshiken…
Note how Mada is left in a typically Madarame-esque situation due to his profession of passivity. He doesn’t even get to state any preference. His little harem fantasies are written to indicate that Hato-chan would be an acceptable member of a group attention-lavishing scene – whether he wants to bundle the whole gang off to the yurt is another matter. It is not that he can’t process all the attention, it is just that the processing has stopped at “Good to be King“. Sue as exotic temple dancer is a master-stroke.
Dare he try ANY kind of 3D and risk the destruction of this fantasy? But whose fantasy is it?
Something about butterflies… Who is dreaming and who is the dream?
Historically, Japan was at least two up on the prehistoric Western world’s guy-lock on romance tales thanks to Murasaki and Shonagon, but their works were not exactly in wide circulation until the twentieth century. And the narratives they advanced were hardly society-shaking. In the rest of the world, narratives of romantic love appear to be mostly male creations until late in the game. Sapho exists only in fragments, and they were enough to scare the bejesus out of the guys. I missed any University level courses on 17th to 19th century english lit, and so the exact timeline for earlier efforts but I vaguely recall that some “virtue tales” of female submission to rich suitors (Pamela, etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela,_or_Virtue_Rewarded) were written by guys in the 1700’s. Even then controversy ensued, with a few satires and perhaps even Sade’s infamous Justine written in response.
England in the 1800’s got Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein (surely, a love story), so at least there was some women’s input, though Brontë first published under a male-sounding non de-plume. Skip forward into the twentieth century, and we see that popular romances, though penned by women were being converted into movies by large, very patriarchal movie studios. Who was more the author for Gone with the Wind; Margaret Mitchell or David O. Selznick & Co.?
Now everyone gets to toss their ideas into the ring. Straight girls and guys as well as gays and lesbians and the whole LGBTQ spectrum get to write their stories and argue about their individual ideas about the proper ways of finding happiness, true D’awwwwww and snuggles (or whatever else turns individual cranks). And, as always, one can write the odd bits that don’t fit well onto the mysterious, imagined “other”. Nothing new there either, but no more witch burning allowed.
It is one thing to attempt to imposes one’s whims onto mainstream notions of male: female love, desire and courtship. It is another thing entirely to “colonize” a minority sexuality of a different gender and/or society for your own amusement and pleasure, even if you get side benefits from allegorically addressing certain issues of roles and power within your society. And the rotten girls are not going to stop, no matter how many yaoi ronso episodes pop up. You might as well argue with the hardcore fans of other paraphilias that their fantasies are hurtful, mean and dangerous to real humans. The responses will be the same, and familiar to even Genshiken readers.
And now I feel a bit guilty for all the exploitative v1 yuri smut I have consumed over the years. Just a bit, It’s complicated…
Perhaps Madarame and Hato should hole up in Mada’s apartment and devour a stack of contemporary non-exploitative, woman-authored, lesbian approved “feels” yuri to get some insight into handling confusing feelings. Hato should bring his chan persona just in case. Since the quality of the advice currently offered to them is so ill-suited to their predicament in any case, a little from the other side of the trenches couldn’t do much more damage. Shimoku Sensei could have a field day dragging another empire of delusions into the fray.
Personally I would recommend, as I am currently enjoying, the works of Takemiya Jin.
Stop! It is dangerous to base one’s ideas of romance on popular fictional narratives. No good can come of it!
From my misppent youth, I remember the teenage sister of a friend who fell heavily for the high school freak, who was prone to acting out the worst excesses of “hippie” behaviour a decade and a half too late. She had her own problems; a taste for massive amounts of recreational hallucigens and other self-destructive behaviour. Their search for a model of a “normal” romance led them to lock themselves in the basement TV viewing room at her parents house and snuggle while watching soap operas in order to learn how to construct a conventional romance. I shit yee not! The resulting relationship was odd, full of imagined infidelities and one case of amnesia. 3D far weirder than 2D!
But reality is reality and…
On second thought, Mada and Hato better also grab a stack of Gintama tankubons. Ten years of it! Shout Out Time! Wow!
As for the works of Takemiya Jin, I had run into them before and a few glowing recs from Erica-sensei caused me to seek them out again. I now see that the collected volume she recommends was spread out across a slew of one-shots and various titles (as available to us cheapskate leeches), but take place around the same group of young women. There are hardly any herp derp hawt secks scenes, which used to be the whole point of yuri – but their absence is not missed.
What Takemiya-sensei’s stories do have plenty of is brooding, emotional relationshippy stuff, but measured out in believable doses. I find myself making D’awwwwww noises. And I really, really, really like the character artwork. Takemiya-sensei uses a fine strong line and is one of the few artists who can do the pointy-chin face and get away with it (for moi, your mileage, etc…). Most of the time I find the pointy face shojo heroine a a warning signal for a vapid helpless thing (or the occasional sword weilding heroine – who I have no problems in principle with – its just that they are far too patient with nasty fools to appeal to me [1]). These women are far from either extreme. They are practical romantics and that sets them up for no end of relationship troubles – somewhat like real life. Their expressive manga eyes brood over their predicaments while their mouths are set with a grim determination to figure the whole messy thing out somehow; to keep going, to take their desires seriously, even as these desires threaten to shatter them or turn them into lovestruck idiots.
Perhaps it is because I grew up aquainted with a few women friends who liked other women, lusted after one or another of them and once the adolescent hormone surge receeded, found them good occasional company. What stuck was an admiration for how their heartfelt longing for idealized romantic love was perpetually at odds with their cold, hard, pregmatic outlook on relationships and life. I always suspected that they secretly looked at themselves in the mirror and hoped to see a hero staring back. What the heck, who hasn’t? There are worse things in the world than making a fool of oneself for love. I got lucky I guess: assholes come in all models but I pretty well missed the wimmen’s versions, so I can foolishly generalise in a sympathetic manner. Takemiya-sensei’s stories remind me of them somehow.
We get more than “story A” in Takemiya Jin’s works. Characters only pair up after a lot of consideration and worry that they will mess up existing friendships, or feel like crap if they are rejected and/or break up. There is also a small degree of powder ritually burnt about whether the intended one will think that yuri v2 romance (aka real gosh honest to goodness lesbian romance, as written by an “out” Japanese lesbian!) is weird. Some of the characters are deeply into the idea of romantic love, while others abjure it as too fraught with emotional danger – even though they secretly wish it could one day be theirs. Confessions don’t always bring instant happiness, though reconsideration pops up as a reoccurring motif. There is even a token gay guy friend of one of the more active lesbian characters; she gets stuck with him shadowing her at school, gets used as a beard by him, gets a lot of unanswerable “what should I do?” questions and then has to counsel his younger sister to stop manisfesting her misplaced jealousy as childish homophobia. The scene when sis is sure that older brother is doing gay as yaoi and needs to be calmed down is a hoot!
My only minor complaint is that Takemiya-sensei has the dark-haired brooding type and the active blonde type, and the blond older woman type and as the characters overlap between stories it is sometimes dfficult to remember who is who (and pining for who, while pined for by who) – especially when a story has two nearly identical dark-haired characters in a love triangle (one wears glasses). It gets a bit confusing.
So two reticent male Genshiken characters, one with a head full of loli crap and josou games, and another with a head full of yaoi dojins, wondering what to make of their feelings could do worse than take a few tips from the cautious life lessons offered by Takemiya Jin. Both Madarame and Hato are tentative about 3D anything, including friendship. Some of the wimmins in Takemiya Jin’s ‘verse do just end up as friends. Perhaps Shimoku sensei has been holding the (v2, non exploitative) yuri in reserve all this time?
If Kio Shimoku decides to push the Hato-crush plot even further he is going to get to have a whole lot of fun with the other big weak spot in yaoi-land; the idiotic, formulaic insistance on the seme/uke typology. And we have been getting some previous plot telegraphing about this: Hato always imagined his “objectivised male self” as a seme. Except that when he is in Hato-chan mode and trancing over Madarame – then he begins to think uke-Hato-chan-otome-yaku-whatever. Pity that Madarame is so damn passive, that he couldn’t even be a sou-uke, let alone any kind of seme. Sou-uke requires something beyond catatonic withdrawal.
Then toss in the “Am I turning gay, or can I get away with the [only for you] excuse?” from yaoi lore. While Hato can put off a few worries with this, Madarame would have to do a whole lot of sweating, even if he occomodates the experiment as a josou game fantasy that has come to life. Madarame is now too far gone to consider any 3D attention, from anyone. Expect vicious “How to cure a lolicon” and “josou sanmyaku” (Crossdressing Mountain Range – game) jokes ‘o plenty as he tries to find an emotionally safe place to curl up into and weather the storm.(2)
Meanwhile to Hato: Even if originally written as nominally straight in 3D matters, he must have found the idea of manly as-warped-by-pervy-women romance strangely appealing. So he somehow got stuck on the idea that yaoish romance was a good model for romance in general. Questions of bodies and genders could even have been put aside for a bit if the first BL-ish magazines he stumbled across featured androgynous bishies – he was, after all not developing secondary sexual characteristics as much or as fast as his junior high classmates. Hence the latest little ret-shade offered up to us by Shimoku-sensei. This offers a convenient plot excuse for leaving the judo club as well. Androgynous lovers who did rough, rapey man(ly) secks in tandem with over -the-top you-and-only-you-forever-even-if-the-earth-takes-my-dead-body romanticism did something for him. The female self he constructed was a way of denying the logical implications of his fantasies, as well as being the vehicle with which he could finally find a social wherein he could fan over them.
The Genshiken finally empowers him to constuct his own fantasies; to engage in secondary, fannish production, to take charge of the mechanisms of his own desires and draw his story. But of course he can’t. He can only draw clench scenes. His imagination is primarily visual. From his stand(s), we can see that he has been written as having extensive trope genre knowledge, but canot turn it into a full “na-me” storyboard. In this matter having Ogiue help him is only a half-measure, because she is as visually based as he is. Rika is the only text-narrative-biased fujoshi in the Genshiken, and she has no off switch. No help there.
Could it be a suppressed narrator-Hato that is pulling all the strings?
“If I can’t get you to write it, I’ll make you live it! Dance my little puppet! Dance!”
What a fine detective story! Better than a murder mystery in a society of telepaths!
Hato should have imprinted on the v.1 yuri of Ken Kurogane. The polygamous “lets fuck like crazy right now” of gay and straight male pr0n, the over the top romanticism of yaoi but with girl bodies and no damn seme /uke stuff to get in the way of a good sweaty tangle. Male mangaka, hmmmmmmm… Is Shojo Sect full of reworked yaoi and bara puppets presented as “girls”? The mirrors of desire in the manga-land funhouse are distorted as all heck! But at least then Hato-chan could have gone looking for a nice spunky girl who could best him (her) in a judo match…
Duh!
How far does Kio Shimoku care to push the Hato-crush motif? It looks like it can get cruel really fast, even if it is well in keeping with his habit of using the Genshiken to skewer otaku (and now fujoshi) foibles.
Personaly I still don’t buy any bit of Hato x Mada x Hato. Perhaps I am in denial, but I cannot believe either of them in any kind of physical relationship with anyone, given their current states. Both are now emotional wrecks. Of course Kio Shimoko can write Hato and Mada into a well-lubed orgy along with the rest of the crew, the brave little toaster, chibi-godzilla and a tentacled monster from the planet transexual in any upcoming chapter he cares to, but that would be the last chapter of the Genshiken. Done, Forever.
Also, while I used to be an enthusiastic Sue x Mada shipper, I now believe that Shimoku-sensei has dropped in too many scenes where it looks like Sue is embarrassed in Mada’s direction, but Hato is always there too in clear line of sight. If we need Sue yuri-ish hijinx in the Genshiken, then there is even a use for Hato-chan in the 3D secton of the Genshiken ‘verse. Sue might be able to salvage the wreck that is Hato, even if it might take months of chaste dating to calm him down,
Also, I am still waiting for the moteki field effect to hit Hato. Madarame had his four “suitors”, By my intuited rule of parallel haplessness, Hato should get some attention soon, from other girls besides Yajima and Kono. Phhhttttt! Kono doesn’t even count if she doesn’t get her game on soon.
Similarly, I can’t see Keiko doing anything but looking at Madarame and deciding that he is just too much work even for a love-struck young hostess. Let the big boobed gaijin girl have some fun next comiket; the moteki field has collapsed and unemployed, relationship-clueless, creepy manga consuming, sulking, passive Mada is once again hopeless. And all that 2D FOREVER stuff tastes like ashes in his mouth. Time for Mada to change his life.
Gambatte! Madarame-san! I know you can become #1 host!
If this keeps up, Ogiue will have to impose a NO DATING IN THE GENSHIKEN, DAMMIT! rule, just to calm things down a bit.
Snap out of it and go make some dojins!
Random Endnotes:
[1] You can’t fool me! I know that a proper lesbian vanquisher of evil looks like Hothead Paisan [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothead_Paisan]. I rue the day I picked that thing up – a joke gift given to a straight woman friend who was being teased +/or supported by her frends after one more disappointing relationship had just ended. Yikes! Cannot un-see, but it made a lot of sense within its context. You think Hothead Paisan would do any stupid rose duelling? She’d shoot the fucking goomba in the face, twice, cut off his junk, lay into anyone, male or female who stood in her way and burn the evil twit rose-dueling school to the ground. Problem solved! Run off into the sunset with the rose-maiden, and shoot a few rednecks on the way! …As long as the coffee didn’t run out. One wouldn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity, but I understand where her creator was coming from.
I understand rage.
Recall:
“Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist.
Children already know that dragons exist.
Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”
Closer to current manga practice, consider Gaku of Murasaki-iro no Qualia. She’ll off one of herselves, if herself gets in the way of saving her friend. That’s how to do hero!
[2] I have a suspicion that the josou one-off tale and the game noted by the Girl Cartoons josou genre essay series (pt3)
” Maintaining this line of reasoning—foremost, the assumption that many Josou works can be read as allegorical of the development of the fandom as a whole—we turn to the erotic visual novel 女装山脈 (josou sanmyaku) or “Crossdressing Mountain Range”, by Nounai Kanojo. Josou Sanmyaku draws a number of parallels to “How to Cure a Lolicon”, and while it is less explicitly allegorical, it nonetheless represents a typical conception of the development of Josou fandom, and development of attraction to the “otokonoko”—which, compared to “Lolicon”, is made very explicit here—and makes a few interestingly novel claims about the fandom which might almost be considered moral prescriptions.
To begin with, Josou Sanmyaku is aggressive in its invocation of the “otokonoko”. The three heroines², all crossdressing males, insist on referring to themselves not as 男の子 (with the kanji for “child”), but as 男の娘 (with the kanji for “young girl”). The “otokonoko” is established in the game’s mythos as something of a third gender, revealed eventually to even be able to bear children via supernatural means. Particularly in the first act of the game, which includes one erotic scene featuring each heroine, there is a strong undercurrent in the dialogue of the otokonoko being capable of providing pleasure far beyond that which a normal woman possibly could, and of the heroines’ goal being to “ruin” the protagonist such that he could not be satisfied by normal women again”. – – http://8c.dasaku.net/?p=72
were notorious enough, to serve as the model for Kousaka’s company’s crossdressing game in Genshiken.
The Genshiken is all about rude doujin makin. Draw what you know, neh? Kio-gami is a mangaka, not a light novel writer. For those us us who skivved out on drawing classes, scribbling is easier than scratching. Plaisir de texte and all that..
HEARTS OF FURIOUS FANCIES 