Cruel Angel Theses

So I was sitting through my 3 hour Sociology class today, and it was a drag. A drag not because of the subject itself, which is really quite interesting by nature, but because my lecturer sucks. Not in the traditional sense that means “incompetent failure” but more of the “can’t stop going off on a tangent” sense. She’ll get off-topic because she’s trying to give us practical examples (seeing how we’re doing Crime and Deviance I don’t think really I need that, thanks).

And when I get bored I generally look out the window, play with my pen, scribble on my notepad. Today was pretty different though — she printed out the powerpoint slides for the day’s notes, and while I was reading ahead of the class as she was bringing up E/N Story #971 I stumbled upon Robert Merton’s “Strain Theory”. Seeing how this is pre-university stuff I hope it isn’t too hard to follow — Merton basically tries to explain why certain people deviate, and the different types of deviance that follows. The study was done on young working class males in the USA, 1940.

(from notes)

• The values practised and praised back then: Success = Wealth
• Social strain takes place when a society socialises people into the value of pursuing such things as wealth as a desirable social goal — but fails to provide the means of doing so.
• These people then go through illegal means in order to attain their wealth, which causes deviance in society.
• This leads to anomie* as values promoted aren’t achieved leaving the individual lost.

*anomie is a term used to define a situation where the norms and values of a society are unclear and people feel unsure about the rules that should guide their behaviour. People are in effect without norms.

Situation sounds familiar? This is an actual table replicated from the textbook:

+ = Acceptance
- = Rejection
+/- = Rejection of prevailing values and substitution of new values

It was a eureka moment. I thought, “hey, doesn’t that sound familiar…” and was applying it in no time to the messy debate about KyoAni while the lecturer droned on in the background. This can only work if the statement that KyoAni is an excellent animation studio is accepted as the majority opinion out there right now, because this will then proceed to explain, but not solve, the fuss everyone’s been making post-Lucky Star.

The fact remains that KyoAni is the public darling of the moment, and the dissenting voices default as deviance; deviance here being defined as behaviour which departs from the social norms and values held by the majority in a social group. Allow me to differentiate between the seemingly indistinguishable opinions everywhere, which appear to be divided into fans and haters on the surface.

Applying the information we have to the table, we get:

Modes of Adaptation = Various opinions about KyoAni
Cultural Goals = “KyoAni is a good animation studio”
Institutionalized Means = “KyoAni’s anime is good”

A short explanation of terms — Modes of Adaptation would translate to opinions about KyoAni because “adaptation” here is in direct reference to how society adapts to the current norms/values (Cultural Goals) held at the time, which, in this case, is “KyoAni is an excellent animation studio”. Institutionalized Means is how society goes about achieving Cultural Goals, and how do you come to the conclusion that KyoAni is the best? By believing that their anime is good.

Breaking it down, here’s how it fits.

• Conformity are those who think KyoAni is excellent and their anime is good — nothing very complicated there.
• Innovation are those who think KyoAni is excellent but reject the notion that (all) their anime is good — in other words, Lucky Star sucks, Kanon rocks, etc tl;dr.
• Ritualism are those who think that KyoAni isn’t much but that their anime is good — those who like their works but don’t think much of the studio, basically.
• Retreatism are those who think that KyoAni sucks, and their anime sucks — the “pure” deviants so to speak.
• Rebellion would be those who, as stated above, substitute the existing values — KyoAni is either excellent/suck and their anime is good/bad — for their own.

What we have here is also a classic example of structuralist theory regarding deviance, or “organic solidarity”. Durkheim, the sociologist that coined the term, basically says that members of society are instructed to breathe the value system that that society currently believes in, in this case “KyoAni is good”. The reason for everyone going into their respective tirades about Lucky Star is that they can’t reconcile their dislike for the anime with the value system we currently hold as a community, and which is why some people seem to be at odds at themselves about it.

A simpler solution would be to follow the Rebellion option and instead of believing that KyoAni is either excellent/suck and that the anime they make are good/bad, judge an animation studio as being just that, an animation studio, and judge the anime made not through precedents or black-and-white opinions, but on their individual merit, subjectively. Which is also what I’ve been doing all along, but that’s another story.

When I started writing this out I thought it was going to go somewhere but it didn’t in the end, and you’ve just wasted your time reading this if you thought there was because sociology isn’t really about solving society’s problems but rather just studying society, and how it interacts. The Wikipedia article about strain theory is here though, and if you feel like bashing huge gaping holes in my theory application, well, suit yourself.

Oh, and it would be fun to get into a mini-discussion about this, you can start by telling me (if you read through and understood the whole thing, of course!) which Mode of Adaptation you fit into so I can start off by calling you a deviant if you’re not the pure conformist type. Not.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered with the other series — even if there was enough hours in the day for me to watch first episodes of Claymore, Sola, Romeo x Juliet (gotta love Shinsen-Subs for not making stupid .mkvs) and El Cazador de la Bruja (which I don’t remember anyone on my blogroll reviewing) all at one shot, my eyes are complaining. Maybe I’ll be posting every single day this week too, or I could just cheat and do a 4-in-1 if I can’t find much to say about the rest, but I hope that won’t be the case.