Summer season preview and thoughts

I’m usually not one to cynically comment on every season how “this will be a perfect time to focus on my backlog”, but truth to be told, the upcoming season really is the perfect time for that. Not because it would be so ridiculously boring, (in fact it’s not even the worst season in recent memory), but because the current spring season is so ridiculously good. If you only follow 4-5 series in a season, then you are better off with picking only the 1-2 best from the next one, and supporting it with the remaining great series of this season, than with any top 5 that the next ones could throw at us.

Even if you are watching 10 series like me, there are still some more that are worth of watching. I’m still backlogging Lupin III,

But enough gushing about this season, and let’s look into the next one. After all,  it still can have some pleasant surprises:

Anybrony?

You know what’s awesome? My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

And you know what’s stange? The way it barely had any impact on the anime fandom. I mean, I see some pony avatars on anime forums, and some bloggers occasionaly reference the show, but only to the same extent as they reference any other nerdy subject, and not more so than anyone else. You would expect it to be especially well-received in the otakudom, but there are barely any signs of the My Little Pony fandom has a disproportianate number of anime fans.

It reminds me of the release of Katawa Shoujo, a few months ago. That also received a few obligatory blog posts and comments, but that was it. Meanwhile, on the Internet, it created a bigger buzz than anything that the whole anime fandom together could create. It was more discussed than the most discussed anime of the past years, and it was incomparably bigger than anything in it’s own medium of Visual Novels. (Even the stats of Little Busters can only avoid being a completely flat line when compared to it, by having an anime announced around that time). It was incredibly popular, just not in the expected otakudom. Probably it happened through gaming websites, that first reported short notes about “some sort of Japanese cripple porn” being released, then the comment sections started to turn into flamewars with everyone who read the thing insisting that it’s noting like that, and everyone else first calling them crazy, then changing their minds after checking it out.

By the way, these fascinating flamewar threads were the other thing that is similar between My Little Pony and KS. It’s rare to find arguments on the Internet where one side is objectively right and the other is wrong. These had fans on one side struggling to even make it clear what the story is about, with prejudiced commenters on the other side, believing that the whole idea of a fandom standing up to such works must be one big trolling, and their first impression based on stereotypes must be more accurate than the experience of the actual audience’s statements. Even more fascinatingly, these were the only flamewars ever, with one side continously winning, after they convinced the other to check it out before criticizing it.    I’ve never seen so many people spelling out “Ok, I was wrong” as in MLP and KS threads.

Back on topic: So, there is My Little Pony, that should logically feel more familiar to anime fans than to others. After all, we are the guys who already watch very pink stuff like Azumanga Daioh, about girls doing cute things, and not even just because of the pretext that  it’s technically shonen. We also watch children’s anime, and series like Kimi ni Todoke, that are full-out girlish romances. Watching My Little Pony shouldn’t be all that different from any of these. We already gave up the idea that men should only watch “manly” series about fire and blood, we are OK with cuteness.

I don’t know, maybe that’s exactly the reason why not so many anime fans identify as “bronies”. Maybe many of us watched it, but then just mentally nodded, and listed it with all the other relatively good moe shows, instead of making a big deal out of it.

Blogger’s creed

I decided that as a belated introduction post, I should write a list of things that I believe about art, about the anime industry, and about my personal standing on some hot button issues. Some of these were already adressed in earlier posts, others will be in the future, and some are too self-evident or mundane to waste a whole post on them.

The Anime Elitist’s Paradox

By definition, elitists are those who think that some  people have more worthy opinions than the common man. That an elite of intelligent, tasteful, educated, and experienced opinion leaders are more qualified to tell what is right and what is wrong, than a random mass of people. “Coincidentially”, most elitists consider themselves to be exceptionally intelligent, tasteful, educated, and experienced.

Normally, in media fandoms, elitism is used to describe a rethoric that is revolving around the fear that a shallow, ignorant audience member’s preference is worth as much as a fan’s who truly cares about the medium in question, then the resulting works will be dumbed down, “pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator“, for the sake of making more money.

Seen It A Million Times

Random anime picture, to demonstrate that this will end up being an anime post

A few years ago, when I already knew enough english to start participating in real discussions with native speakers, I started to notice an interesting quirk of the language: people using the phrase “literally” in front of figures of speech. After double-checking my dictionary to make sure that it really means what I think it means,  I concluded that it must be a really difficult word to remember, and smugly congratulated to myself for noticing it even in spite of that, and for having a better grasp of english vocabulary than many native speakers.

Except that soon after that, I started to notice that people around me, myself included, are kind of doing the same in my own native Hungarian, with our own figures of speech. For example, I say  ”[the words literally froze into me]” when I am so shocked that I couldn’t say anything, or “[these pigeons are literally getting more eyeless from day to day]“, where “eyeless” is an idiom for “bold”, “brash”, or “cheeky”.

It looks like people aren’t really having a problem with remembering what “literally” means. When someone says that their large-scale movie is “literally a blockbuster”, they truly mean to say that it’s not just an exaggerated praise for a medium scale movie, but it’s a real large scale movie. They just fail to remember that “blockbuster” is supposed to be more than a synonym of that, it’s also a figure of speech comparing movies to bombs. To me, it is easier, because I learned to meaning of “block” and “buster”  long before first hearing “blockbuster” being used about movies. On the other hand, saying that bold pigeons are “[eyeless]“, is the most normal thing to me, it’s the primary usage of the phrase in Hungarian, and I have to think hard to even remember that it originally had something to do with actual eyes.   And it’s the other way around with you. You might find “blockbuster” to be a word that  means “big movie” by default, and it’s old meaning is only an obscure etymological trivia, while calling something [eyeless] would instantly give you a very grotesque mental image.

Strangely, it looks like someone who only heard a word a few times, for example a foreigner, can be more reflective about finding idiom’s original building blocks, than an experienced speaker who instantly jumps to thinking about the intended message of the phrase, and doesn’t need to stop thinking about the smaller elements.

So,  you ask why am I talking about Hungarian idioms, and about linguistic theories, on an anime blog?

Sales analysis 2011

Thanks to the anime industry enthusiasts over at mania.com forums, who collect all the official sources into their forum posts, we can always take a look at data from Bluray and DVD sales in a practically collected format.

For example, rather than looking at a single season, that might be exceptionally weak or strong, we can get an even better overall picture, if we look at the whole previous year, merged into a single list, from the Winter 2011 season that started in last January, to the end of the Fall 2011 seasons that ended in last december.

Criticism of the Clichés of Criticism

While checking the Aniblog Tourney participants, I found a post from Bradley, of Those Damn Cartoons, on an issue that interests me a lot. Reviews with a mocking tone, and their negative effects. In the post, Bradley describes how since MST3K, most reviewers seem to treat bad shows as nothing more than a source of jokes, and this way, we “ lose the opportunity to have other, interesting conversations about when and why anime fails to entertain, and close any dialog with folks who might have enjoyed that anime and could offer a perspective we didn’t consider, perhaps even getting us to enjoy what we disliked on a second viewing.”

Tsuritama no Apollon: AO

Three more shows are here for first episode tests. This time, only the first two are comparable to each other in many ways, with the Eureka Seven sequel as the odd one out. I also wanted to add Jormungand, but I couldn’t really say anything meaningful about it that others didn’t. I’m not even sure if I like it. And I’m not so much interested in just reviewing episodes by describing all their aspects, as finding at least one issue in them, or around their audience reactions, that made me think about something unique.

Sankarea Kanojo X Amnesia – And then every anime was a SHAFT series

Three more first episodes arrived in the past days, so here are my first impressions. There is a strange amount of connections between them. Two are about dead/living romances. Two were better than expected from their studios DEEN and Hoods. Two has exceptionally icky premises. Two of them are based on manga that I have been following, even though I rarely follow manga. All three make use of surreal imagery, or as the anime fandom likes to call it, “They look like they were made by SHAFT”.

Genre legitimacy

I was always interested in the fine line between a medium or genre convention, that one is expected to accept as an inherent purpose of the story, and other, minor tropes.

It’s another part of the neverending objectivity/subjectivity debates: If you can successfully argue that your favourite story did what it did because that’s how things are done in that genre, that gives the story some kind of legitimacy, and the best thing the haters can say is “Well, then I don’t like this genre”, but if you don’t manage to make that claim, then they can still say that your story is just a failed deviation of the greater genre.