Waifu Culture: A Troubled Marriage

Selie Leave a comment

Way better than my try at this idea.  If you’ve read my post, definitely read this one as well, as it’s much more detailed and better written.

The Afictionado's avatarThe Afictionado

waifu bar

[First, I’d like to apologise for using a pseudo-meme as the opening image. Second, I would like to forewarn that this post contains mention of sexual harassment and child abuse]

There is nothing wrong with loving fictional characters. When everything else in a story goes to pot, the characters and the emotional attachment we have to them are often what keeps us hooked and allows many a show that would have otherwise run itself into the ground to soldier on. The characters are what we hold dear to our hearts and imaginations, and as they are non-existent conceptual beings created for the purpose of art, copyrights aside, they are in a way ours as soon as they hit the public sphere. I’d say no harm has ever come from loving something, but if you get deep enough into some subsets of fan culture, it can have some weird outreaching connotations.

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FLCL and Revitalizing Creativity – Throwing S**t at the Wall Until Something Sticks

Selie Leave a comment

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Innovation is an idea that’s a lot harder to produce than what it may seem.  Within an industry, you’ll see a significant amount of titles or products that all seem to look the same simply because innovation is difficult to create at all times.  However, that’s why innovation and creativity are necessary elements.  Without them, stagnation starts to creep in, possibly causing the failure of an industry.  It’s weird to think that the anime industry would have this problem, what with hundreds of shows and multiple unique ideas being produced every single year.  Even though some may say there’s a decline, numbers show that the anime industry has been happily growing since the 90s with more and and more shows and larger profits being made.  However, just like other inevitable phenomena — war, famine, another shitty parody movie that tries to be Airplane but fails — there are times in an industry that creativity and innovation are not as present or simply very much needed.  The early 2000s was a situation like this for anime.  The industry was just starting to grow after the mega hits of the late 90s, and needed something new in order to inspire others and rocket itself into the massive industry that it is today.  A few shows started to display interesting ideas that were based around older series (such as One Piece, Rurouni Kenshin, Gundam), but I would argue FLCL (pronounced “Fooly Cooly”) was that one big thing that had such massive creativity that it showed not only what anime could do, but how the industry could turn from a once blossoming tree, which slowly grows each year, into a gargantuan oak that eats orcs and takes down Saruman in the second act.  FLCL is inspirational because the show itself is an inspired work.  It wore its heart on its sleeve and showed a massive amount of references and wacky humor while attempting to combine interesting ideas from many different places.  FLCL’s philosophy is, in a sense, the same as a monkey’s attempt at art:  Throw as much shit on the wall as you can and use what sticks.  However, this works so well because what stuck was so polished and great that it didn’t matter if it was the weirdest piece of art a creature could excrete and smear on a wall.

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My Personal Favorites of 2014

Owningmatt93 Leave a comment

With the Winter 2015 Anime Season now coming to a close, I wanted to make a final post about my thoughts of the 2014 Anime Season as a whole. This will be a series of two posts, with this one focusing on the more positive aspects of 2014 anime.

Before I get into the post, I want to explain my reasoning for doing a particular post like this, as some people may just write this post off as me stating my personal opinions on these shows. Although that is partially the reason why those shows made it onto the list, I would like to mention there were several shows that I enjoyed in 2014, but out of all of them, these were the ones that I will personally remember as the years continue on. These are also the ones that I hold in high regards in comparison to all of the other shows of that year, and are shows I could recommend to anyone that is a fan of anime.

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Mai Waifu Vs. Your Best Girl – The Ideas of “Waifuism” Versus “Best Girl”, and how the Celebration of Characters can be a Good Thing if not Taken too far.

Selie Leave a comment

Fair warning, while I try to be unbiased to an extent in my discussions, I feel this one is a bit more opinionated than my other ones.  I’m not deeply entrenched in 4chan’s /a/ or other anime communities, so my viewpoint about the terms “waifu” and “best girl” comes from a different perspective.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading my discussion!

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If you’ve ever watched Azumanga Daioh, there’s a hilarious scene where the creepy teacher of the school, Kimura, drops a picture of a beautiful woman from his coat pocket.  The students pick it up and comment on how she’s very beautiful and looks like a nice woman, wondering who she might be.  The creeper of a teacher suddenly appears from behind them and exclaims in deadpan, broken English that she’s “Mai waifu.”  The students freak out, not only over his sudden appearance, but that such a beautiful and charming woman would be married to a suspected pedophile and scary man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AgDbAT56I0

Originally, the terms “waifu” and “hazu” were borrowed from English in the early 1980s in order to better define modern marriage in Japan as the original Japanese term for wife, “Kanai”, means “inside the house” and the term for husband, “shujin” or “danna”, means “master”.  Obviously outdated, “waifu” and “hazu” were adopted to show a modern expression of equal treatment.  While Japanese otaku definitely would have used the term before, fans of the show Azumanga Daioh thought the juxtaposition of a possible pedobear with a wonderfully nice woman, as well as the teacher’s broken English response, were so funny, the term “Mai tumblr_l5balcNZfe1qcaxovo1_1280Waifu” came to become a meme for the people of the Internet.  The term means that a female character a person enjoys is so loved by that person, they claim to be “married” to them.  People have also used it to refer to their favorite character in general, disregarding gender and including male characters in a humorous, but endearing way as also their “waifus” and sometimes “husbandos”.  While for some, the level of love towards their fictional character is just a fun aside to their own lives, many on the Internet latched onto the idea of having an actual love interest in their two dimensional favorite characters.  This in itself is not bad as I feel we’ve all been there to certain extents.  I know I personally love at least half of the main characters Joss Whedon has ever written and, given the chance, I would absolutely date Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly and I’m a hetero male.  However, it’s important to note that these fantasies can be taken too far.

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Winter 2015 Anime – Plan to Watch

Owningmatt93 Leave a comment

This is a revision from my previous posts on Tumblr since these shows are now halfway completed.

As the previous post was more about how I thought a particular show would be perceived, this post will kind of confirm or deny some of those thoughts that I may have had, without necessarily saying that the show is good or bad. I didn’t want to do a full re-post of it, as I figured that would be pretty boring and would give some misconceptions about how I do things.

With that said, let’s get into some airing anime discussion!

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Genshiken vs. Genshiken Nidaime:  Old vs New.  My Nostalgic Ramblings and how Changing Views in Otaku Culture Show a Great Future.

Selie 5 Comments

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Every now and then, the anime industry loves to poke fun at itself.  Sometimes, this self-awareness from the industry is like Watamote (the real name is way too long to type), where it makes us uncomfortable with how accurate it is to our own awkward lives, basking in our memories of awkward situations and episodes, completely departing from realism to the chagrin of those around us.  However, other times, the industry uses a softer approach, taking our wonderful memories of reveling in our nerd culture and both poking fun and celebrating their importance to us.  Genshiken and Genshiken Nidaime are anime of this latter approach.  Genshiken or, as it’s subtext defines it, The Study of Modern Visual Culture is a manga/anime about a college club of the same name and their experiences loving, hating, and discussing all of the merits of otaku culture.  The series takes all of the games, anime, manga, etc. that we know (as well as some fakes ones it invented so wonderfully that they were spun off as their own anime) and takes pride in using their likeness for comedic and celebratory effect.  In fact, a surprising thing from this series is that it doesn’t just parody other anime, games, manga, etc. with alternative names or other ways to get around copyright.  For most references, the series straight up calls out the names of the anime and shows actual gameplay of certain games.  Genshiken was always very upfront about what it referenced and used each name or character from a different series as a badge of honor, showing how the creators, like their readers, were also otaku of a high pedigree.

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My Favorite Hilarious Troll Moves I’ve Seen in Anime

Selie 2 Comments

All right, so Madoka was a serious and depressing topic last time, so I thought I’d go with a pick-me-up for this next discussion.  So!  Let’s talk about my favorite hilarious troll moves I’ve seen from anime.  Now these are just my five favorite trolls that I wanted to point out, and I’m limited by what I’ve seen, so I won’t make this a list of “The Top Five of All Anime” or anything that conceited.  Also, another limitation on this list is that I’m only including what I consider as funny image00trolling in anime, i.e.  playing a joke on the audience for a bit of fun, rather than for a sudden plot twist in the story that changes everything, or a scene that is a big middle finger to the fans such as Sword Art Online S1 and its main antagonist’s final spiel. (Also, I’m looking at you, OreImo.  The lesson here is if you wanna write a story, but your publisher doesn’t want it written the way you want, get a new publisher.)  As such, I’m also excluding any major plot twists from anime that greatly influence the story, such as Madoka: The Rebellion Story or other twist endings that change everything in general.  These are all great, but they deserve their own discussion since the anime industry really loves to take a left turn towards the end of their series, whether they need to or not.  Since this isn’t including any major plot twists that dramatically change a series, this discussion will actually be relatively major spoiler free, but we will be going over material that’s in the middle to end of some anime so SPOILER ALERT if you care about minor spoilers for a series.  Now, let’s get this crazy hootenanny, shindig started!

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Puella Magi Madoka Magica – Revisionism and How Studio Shaft “Felt Like Destroying Something Moe”

Selie 3 Comments

Let’s talk about genre for a second.

Now bear with me, I’ll get to the fascinating twists and the dark plot of Madoka Magica soon, but I want to get a little information across first.  For film genres, or any art form for that matter, there are a few different stages that a film can go through. Generally, it starts with an Experimental Stage, where the genre is starting out and the rules haven’t been made just yet.  As an example, think of westerns before they all typically started having one man for good facing off in a high noon duel against the bad guy.

After they finally establish what works, the Classical Stage begins, which is where all of the tropes and ideas generally come from. Eventually, people get tired of those tropes, though, and start the Parody Stage.  For westerns, this was Blazing Saddles. This stage makes fun of the over-used tropes that start to appear within a genre.

Finally, we get to one of my favorite stages: Revisionism.
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Henry Blake’s Plane – How Modern Television Owes a lot to M*A*S*H

Selie Leave a comment

While it’s not anime, M*A*S*H is something near and dear to my heart so I wanted to talk about it real quick. It’s not a huge post and I’ll have one up about Madoka in just a bit. But for now, here’s something from an award-winning 1970s-80s sitcom drama.

 

Radar walks into the makeshift military operating room already in agony, but trying to hold a steady voice.  Around him, everyone is working, attempting to sew up the mountain of casualties that come in one after another onto the operating table.  Radar, too unstable music_abyssinia_henry_01_trapper_humsto stand, leans on the closest thing to him and announces through tears to the doctors, nurses,and staff in the room,  “I have a message… Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake’s plane… was shot down over the Sea of Japan.  It spun in…  There were no survivors.”  Radar walks out and leaves the operating room.  The only sound among the friends of Henry Blake, the closest family he had, is the clink of instruments working through injured bodies of more military casualties.  Somewhere off-screen, one instrument falls to the floor and clatters in the almost silence as everyone continues to work.  There’s no stopping to mourn for their closest friend while the war rages on.  They can only continue to work through their tears.


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Kill la Kill – Feminism, Sexuality, and WHY IS EVERY EPISODE MORE INTENSE THAN THE LAST!?

Selie 7 Comments

 

Important note from author:  This is a much older piece and no longer really depicts my true feelings on Kill la Kill.  I will keep this up as I do think I had some good points but if you’d like to see how I feel several years later, please read this linked article after reading through this one where I critique this article in-depth and come at it with a more mature understanding, disagreeing with myself on particular points.

 

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Let’s talk about feminism and sexuality.  For those that inwardly groan at the mention of these sometimes over-discussed topics, I can promise you that there will be massive fan-service and tons of ridiculous action.  Fair?  But a warning up front:  Given the show we’re discussing, this isn’t exactly going to be safe-for-work at all times.  I’ll also try to be vague about many particular instances in the show, but this will be a spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t seen, or cares to see, the show.  Now that we have our NSFW tag and SPOILER ALERT included, let’s begin.


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