Owen, okay…

Tiem for sum 3-way yaoi.

lolikit X me X Owen yaoi. Disturbing fun for the whole family!

Hmm…judging by the first paragraph you knowingly led us into a hailing shitstormfrom which there was no return. Never mind, the fallout’s proving fun to work through. :P

Like mellow, I am totally lost.

Double post:

… I also don’t know how to use html. Whoops.

[...] But I realized it would be pointless - Owen outlined the inevitable logical fallacies quite nicely here. [...]

Exhibit B here again, extending the life of this topic just a little. A little.

Well, I’m back from a long night of work and I’m just here to clarify what I said. Drudge work gives one a lot of time to think about random things like this. I generally am convinced of your points against my ramblings and I *did* concede them. And I could do so easily because it was my fault for mis-communicating my ramblings in the first place.

I suppose I didn’t make myself very clear, so I hope to explain myself to better explain where I’m coming from. I’ll try to hide my “Dark side,” the contempt I have for the question and the topic that you’ve rightly eviscerated in explaining your “Xanatos Roulette” moment.

(Read: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosRoulette )

I can’t speak for Exhibit A, but I’m a bit ashamed at having been caught pants down in a greater Mass Naked Blog Event. This time, I’ll write on the assumption that there’s a discussion going on, and that I’m not speaking to a few people in frustration.

First and foremost, I am of the opinion that the perceived depth of a work is secondary in concern to the amount of insight that an individual can glean from said work–this also means that in my opinion, individual experience with a work is more telling than trying to establish a blanket standard of what one’s experience with a work should be. Yes, it’s true, if a work is well-enough received by enough people that there will be enough “individual experience” testimonies as to make an obvious case in a work’s favor, but for an individual this is always secondary to his own experience. If a movie has a 96% Rotten Tomatoes rating, it shows that 96% of those counted reviewers gave it a positive review–a very helpful barometer of quality, but not an absolute guarantee that you, too, will be among the 96%.

I’ve apparently already given my answer to the question you’ve posed in your previous post, and accidentally to boot. But you can see that “What the statement meant” to me, really, was “nothing.” Because I still don’t think a work’s perceived “depth” means all that much compared to individual experience–though the simple raising of the topic was still enough to get me ranting. Which, also, says something. About me, anyways.

Continuing on, from my opinion, belief, conviction, or what-have-you, I based my mad rantings. I find the question, “Is this deep?” to be less useful than the question, “What did I get out of this?”

I find that Ghost in the Shell, in all its incarnations, is deliciously cerebral, sometimes subtle, occasionally profound, and almost always thought provoking. Beowulf or the Illiad, however, are… well, if they were written in modern times, they would be cast aside as “dime-novel fluff.” That’s my assessment of it anyway. And yet they’re the real, honest-to-goodness classics. They’ve stuck with us for ages now–literally.

What about these truly lasting classics at all resemble something as brilliant as Ghost in the Shell? Why the hell do all these people keep writing and talking about them, analyzing and writing essays on them? For all I know, it’s because they’re Old. They’re still good reads, and they say a lot about the cultures that originated them (or, at the least, those are the insights I’d gathered), but they lack the sort of written-in intellectual substance that GitS possesses. Well, I seem to think so. Depth, as described as properties of the works in question, doesn’t seem to matter quite as much as readers’ personal experience with these works and their status (Beowulf and the Illiad, as classics). Granted, my personal experience with the two wasn’t quite as pleasant as what I’d found in GitS, but that’s the way it goes, I guess.

This was a situation where what I considered to be “deep” is compared to works that *I* consider to be more shallow and less thought-provoking, but are classics nonetheless. It’s part of my frustration with the question of “Is this deep?” I think asking whether something is “deep” or not is approaching it the wrong way, because people found something to think about in Homer’s epic see something there in what, at the very least, I thought was something rather shallow and straightforward–if melodramatic. Maybe the Illiad doesn’t *need* to be deep in-that-way. If someone can find some insight, pleasure, or meaning in it, then that’s a point in its favor. As MarshallArts posted after my comment, “the only way something is deep is if you interpret it that way.” Which resonates with my opinion rather nicely.

This one’s about your not-really-serious comparison of Lord of the Rings to Genshiken. I will explain my above comment by saying Genshiken wins my vote. The latter provided both humor and insight into otaku culture, and while the former is both a darned good read and a damned great movie series, I came out of reading and watching Genshiken attached to its characters and smiling in self-contemplation–unlike Lord of the Rings, whose characters and dialogue seems to exist solely to further the plot, and doesn’t give the reader much food for thought outside of its narrative context. Personally, my experience with Genshiken was more satisfying.

So there, on the opposite side of the coin, I felt that the work more widely received as “Deep” and “literary” mattered less to me, on an intellectual and emotional level, than a work that most would consider “just a show/comic about otaku, for otaku.” (Though, the caveat remains that I *am* a bit biased, having considered Moorcock’s points against Tolkien long ago.)

I’m not interested in whether a work is “Deep” or “shallow;” I’m interested in what someone can get from that work, however thoughtful or simple that “what” might be. I like hearing about what people get from works, and I like finding something in a work for myself–though I will consider outside testimonials, they’re always secondary to personal experience. And I’m not here to make any arguments, because everything I’ve said is based on opinion–biased, bloody-bird opinions. Symbolism, multi-layered motivations, and subtlety be damned, I’m an instinctual bastard at heart.

But, despite this, I’ll explain why I cannot fault your assessment of Darker than Black, even as you’ve cited those things I *just now* admitted that I cared little for on their own merits. And it’s based on reading your personal testimony.

In reading your Darker than Black essay, I have to admit, I can’t argue against your case in any meaningful way. (I hadn’t intended to, obviously–I remind you again that I was swept up by accident.) I don’t find that I disagree with your assessment, you make a very compelling case, and towards a show you obviously love. By my take, you got quite a lot from DtB, much more than those others whom you mention as having called it “superficial.” While I might not care much for the tools of literary depth, your opinion made me care about the work you’re defending and to accept those tools as proof supporting your analysis. While I may have thrown myself aside by disrespecting the notion of “depth,” as a result of my perspectives on the matter, I cannot say that I do not agree with your sentiments on some level. After all, you found something regarded by many others as “of little worth,” and you made a very strong case as to why that simply wasn’t the case. You gleaned some insight, and offered your own, on a topic that others seemed to care little about. If that doesn’t jive by my sentiments, I don’t know what will.

And that’s what matters to me, and whether or not you find that “deep or entertaining,” that’s up to you. But I honestly hope your “Just as planned” face is still on, because I *do* want to contribute to the discussion you’ve started and in a manner more meaningful than merely being the clumsy, fallacy-ridden “Exhibit B” you’ve chosen to castigate.

Dorian C. Jasper

PS: Moogy, your deconstruction of this Mass Naked Blog Event sends my head a’ spinnin’. I feel like I’m getting in over my head here.

Surprisingly for something spawned via the internet, there seems to be some pretty good discussion going on regarding this issue. Good job pointing out that straw man argument; it was pretty subtle. I didn’t even really think about it until you brought that point to light.

One thing I would like to add is that while I agree with your critique of Exhibit B’s “appeal to motive”, I would also point out that that particular argument is not entirely baseless - one reason why it’s bandied about so frequently in this sort of discussion.

While an appeal to motive has no place when you’re dealing with a strictly binary, true or false type of argument, it’s a different story in a discussion such as this where the terms can mean different things to different people, and in which many of the conclusions are largely subjective. In this kind of setting, providing a critique based on motive can be a powerful tool to give insight into how the other parties in the discussion are viewing the issue.

As you’ve already pointed out, a question like ‘Is anime deep?’ inherently contains a degree of subjectivity, and as such I think it’s valid to analyze the motives of someone arguing in either direction. Everyone who participates in a discussion of this sort comes into it with a number of preconceived opinions. An appeal to motive is more than simply ‘a little diversion’; when dealing with an issue that has no clear cut answers it serves as a fundamentally valid method of peeling away those layers of preconceived notions so that the discourse can proceed on a level playing field.