March Comes in Like a Rigardo
Posted by: Owen S in Manga, Omake, Visual Novel, tags: Commentary, DearS, First impressions, Great Teacher Onizuka, Love Hina, Mahou Sensei Negima, Retrospective, TsukihimeThe problem with anime references or puns is that they usually fall apart quite miserably when you attempt to throw two or more of them together. It’s the sheer futility of making a Yoko Kanno reference in a Nanoha post title (a Venn diagram would easily illustrate the naivete behind this), or stringing together similarities between a not-so-popular mahou shoujo anime and an extremely famous shounen one (on top of a Narnia parallel) that leaves much to be desired, but I try anyway. If you manage to catch both references in the post title, well, consider yourself to have otaku street cred.
if recent episodes are anything to go by, he’s getting there
In other news, I thought long and hard about why anime bloggers succumb way too easily to this fatal condition, seeing how two of my peers sort-of threw in the towel recently. I know, I haven’t been updating enough as of late, I still have four posts for that dreaded 2007 In Review, and no, this isn’t me blogging about why I’m not blogging about anime. I haven’t sunk to such deplorable depths just yet.
I can’t speak for my absent fellow bloggers, but my recent inactivity? It’s Laziness, spelt with a capital “L”, and would be the only rationale I can think of for not writing as much as I should have recently, unscheduled blog outage aside. While it’s always nice to be able to say that “real life’s driving you up the wall”, the fact remains that we all have 24 hours in a day. Unless you’re frantically tapping away at your Blackberry every waking minute of your life, it’s really up to you on how much time you want to make for anime and I dare say I’ve failed in that regard for a fortnight straight.
Before this turns into repugnant atonement, however, there’s the issue of blog outages: I accidentally broke my blog last Sunday. Apparently Wordpress 2.3.3 has this infuriating bug that prevents you from posting by screwing with the auto-save function, and in my haste to look for a cure-all I neglected several facts: my FTP client wasn’t displaying hidden files, I was taking random advice to change my permalink structure on IRC without a failsafe, and to top it all off, I had not much of an inkling on what I was doing.
But that’s old hat. During my downtime I managed to keep myself busy with other non-anime pursuits, and was pleasantly surprised at the results. My first visual novel (I’d like to forget about how mundane and yawn-inducing planetarian was, as I’ve still yet to finish it), for instance. In addition to that, I started on a new manga, re-read two old ones, and caught up with a new-old one that I stopped reading some time ago — I’d say it was a productive week, even if most of it was spent pressing the Space key while staring at my monitor.
alright, maybe there’s some things Lucky Star can’t parody…
Tsukihime has been equal parts impressive and annoying; aside from being the first eroge I’ve ever played (and hopefully not the last one I’m going to play), it’s also a horribly mediocre piece of writing at times that has nothing to do with a terrible editor or inept translator and everything to do with its author Nasu. Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t looking for Murakami-level quality in this, but what annoyed me most was how it was written in a manner best described as inherently unpublishable by Western standards.
The question, then, lies in whether visual novels make for bad writing as a result of substituting imagination for illustration. Why bother detailing how a character looks like when you’ve got sprites? Or describing a background when you’re already juxtaposing it with text? I hope to address that eventually after completing the game, but in the meantime, I’ve got enough reason to soldier on. Beneath the shoddy writing lies something akin to a gem, or at the very least a few fist-sized chunks of diamond in an otherwise desolate and empty quarry — Shiki’s battle with Nrvnqsr Chaos was breathtaking, hit all the right buttons, and proved to be incentive enough for me to continue.
Despite an illuminating post made recently by the developers of Katawa Shoujo I still feel duty-bound to defend the role of the author in the work, having a distinct bias for text over graphics. While the points made are solid, I’m still more inclined to think that a visual novel should have the graphics assisting the text instead of walking side by side as equals; it’s there for the parts where words fail, where descriptions don’t even come close to what the author is trying to say. A bridge in the vital places instead of a crutch.
Then there was DearS. I’ve heard of it before but never really had the incentive to read it due to rampant misinformation regarding its nature: It’s been infamously (and unfairly, I might add) branded “A Chobits clone” despite it being published around the same time that Chobits was, and as a result I had this skewed perception of it until Totali told me to disregard everything I’ve heard about it and give it a shot. I’m glad I did.
Now, I wouldn’t say “DearS is like Chobits”. Rather, I’m more partial towards “Chobits would be like DearS if it wasn’t so damn pretentious”, for the meta-fiction bit irked me no end over how cheesy it was, and the message that it tried to present wavered between Computer Addiction Is Bad and Love Knows No Boundaries before degenerating into a mess of symbols. DearS puts paid to any attempt at such ‘depth’ by making its fanservice notions overt: none of that switch and bait drivel that Clamp did in revealing that the crux of their story was how Hideki couldn’t get it on with his personal computer.
it’s a pity Ren doesn’t seem like the type for a “Shut up shut up shut up!” outburst
On the older side of things, I decided to re-read Great Teacher Onizuka for the first time in 5 or 6 years. It could’ve been less, but this is a manga that’s aged in a manner akin to fine wine, or one of your classmates that you haven’t seen for years since graduating from high school that still looks so gorgeous after all those years. I wouldn’t be kidding if I said I’m a sucker for the latter, but more importantly, what GTO does after so long is fantastic, despite how I vaguely remember every arc and plot twist and outcome.
If one were to do a retroactive comparison, Onizuka would be a modern-day Kamina. The reason why Kamina as a character worked so well was how familiar he felt, a faux-originality that was comforting in its newish oldness. Part of this influence undeniably stems from Onizuka — their shared “act first, think later” mantra, justice embodied, the quintessential Neanderthal with morals. Unlike Kamina, however Onizuka wasn’t infallible, and this is what sets him apart from the rest. The tendency to occasionally slip and fall, when coupled with his penchant for honesty and pure-hearted simplicity — that’s true manliness.
Both Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima are getting their own posts later in a series of writings I plan to do on Ken Akamatsu, but it wouldn’t hurt to say here that I was blown away by how relevant LH is in the age of flat characters and contrived harem rubbish; something every other harem series has parroted since to great failure. What he does isn’t just harem but a blend that’s almost avant-garde in nature, mixing together fanservice, harem, and romance while giving it a slice-of-life twist that no one’s been able to successfully emulate to my knowledge.
More importantly, re-reading both LH and Negima helped me realise that the whole “style v.s. substance” debate is nothing more than left-brain right-brain differences between fans, with one valuing visuals (style) over story (substance), and vice versa. I’m giving it a token mention here till it gets its own post in a bit, but the mutually exclusive natures of such polarising preferences can only mean that I might have gotten it wrong all along — I’d have an easier time getting a right-handed jock to write a 5000 word essay with his left hand about quantum physics than recommending anime of the story persuasion to a visuals fan.
Stay tuned during the next few days as I’ve got a dialogue with one of our esteemed bloggers about everyone’s darling anime of the moment lined up, something I did last Sunday but didn’t get to post. Consider this a taste of things to come as I start blogging more regularly again, for the following week at any rate. It’s good to find the drive again.
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March 12th, 2008 at 2:09 am
In the words of Tiberian Sun, ‘Welcome back, Commander’. (If that’s not a servile greeting, I don’t know what is.)
Probably it’s just because I’m a very textual person, but I feel bound to agree that a visual novel’s images should augment its words: it’s a visual novel, not a novelistic image(!) What I can’t quite agree with, on the other hand, is your parenthetical redefinition of style as visuals and story as substance. Firstly, I don’t think style and substance can be easily separated (if anything, I’d guess they’re different words to describe the same thing). Secondly, ’story fan’ and ‘visuals fan’ are the same kind of pigeonholing categorisations as ‘harem anime’ and ‘mecha anime’ - it’s a little odd to straitjacket someone’s tastes for them. But I’m jumping the gun here, trying to comment on the rumour of a post rather than the post itself, for which I apologise.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:47 am
[...] Owen: I can’t speak for my absent fellow bloggers, but my recent inactivity? It’s Laziness, spelt [...]
March 12th, 2008 at 3:54 am
Hey, thanks, IKnight. I would say something about “goshuujin-sama” (ご主人様), here, but I have a feeling that no matter how I sugarcoated it it’d only come off as grossly inappropriate.
I’m really shooting the breeze when I’m tossing those terms around — if it wasn’t obvious already, no person can possibly fall into a perfect ’story’ or ‘visuals’ categorisation. After all, we’re undeniably human (unless you sentient AIs would like to come out of the closet now), and can’t possibly look at anime and manga like a Predator can with his separate thermal/electromagnetic/Predator vision modes. I wouldn’t pigeonhole as much as I would say that a fan will be inevitably inclined more towards one preference than the other, and that there’s a million shades of grey, but more on that later.
This will all be explained in due time while I bask in the glow of my Eureka moment and poke holes in my reasoning to prepare for war on the battlefield, but I had a feeling you’d get on my case for that innocent little paragraph anyway. (; Consider yourself baited! Apology accepted.
March 12th, 2008 at 4:37 am
Haha, I can see the logic you’re putting into the burnout/rl thing. The time I have for this hobby is something I think about quite a bit xD. I dunno, you have to respect the actions of those who throw in the towel to some extent. It’s really not a matter of time, but more of burn out. Feeling like you’re forced to write is as bad as an MMO trap, and you’ve already drew that parallel in other places.
“DearS”
LOVE POWER WILL SAVE THE UNIVERSE!!!111 AHHHHHHHHHHHHH
March 12th, 2008 at 4:59 am
You pick the best images for your post, cute Tsukihime and Shana parodies. (Although…Tsukasa as Kohaku…? That’s scary. XD)
As usual I can only really talk about one of the series you are referencing and that is Tsukihime… I haven’t played the visual novel in over a year so I can’t speak for the writing but I do know that the Nasu-ese gets a bit messy at times, and I’ve heard it’s this way in its original language as well. I’m not sure if this is what you are referring to; having read very little in terms of original English language books in the last year I can’t compare the writing styles in more of a general fashion. Hope you’ll continue to enjoy the VN.
If one were to do a retroactive comparison, Onizuka would be a modern-day Kamina.
The logistics of that hurt, considering that Kamina came after Onizuka. It’s interesting how your description of Onizuka reminds me a lot of a more recent character, Kaiji as well. Part of me is crying at how characters are good in how they remind us of other characters instead of standing on their own merit, but hey, that’s sentimental power for you.
Good to see your blog working and you posting again.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Welcome back you procrastinating git. :P
How’s that for a non-servile reply? In all seriousness it’s good to see things back online here and in the wider layout too - great stuff. I’m looking forawrd to your thoughts on LH as well actually, since you seem to have a similar sort of sentimental attachment to it as I do. The adage of lightning not striking twice has put me off Negima though, sadly.
I’m not familiar with Tsukihime the visual novel but anime adaptation was something that I feel was somewhat overlooked (in that I thought it wasn’t half bad when everyone else seemed to hate it). They got the music and atmosphere right, if nothing else.
As for the RL/online excuses thing, I don’t believe in apologising for anything. As much as the blogosphere can’t function properly without me(!), moving home is a major hassle, especially when the furniture is arriving TOMORROW and you haven’t even set up the phone line, let alone registered with a new ISP…suffice to say getting my own place again actually takes priority over blogging.
Oh yeah, I’m sure another true tears post will follow soon but your blog needs more Kaiji. no exceptions. ^_^
March 13th, 2008 at 3:40 am
Eh, I’ve fallen victim to my own tendency to take things at face value again, it seems. As for ‘goshuujin-sama’, all I can say is I’m glad this isn’t That GAINAX Maid Show, because I would look rubbish in a trap maid outfit, a trap yukata, or indeed Asuka crossplay.
Ok, I’ll stop having my revenge by filling your mind with visions of Cthulu-esque horror now.
March 13th, 2008 at 4:14 am
Wow, is it me, or has everyone been getting Gravatars recently?
Totali:
I know. It’s just that the intent behind it, for all purposes, either comes off as dishonest (I’m actually burning out, but I’d rather say I’m busy IRL!) or using it as a scapegoat (anime blogging is sooo soul-sucking that I’m going to push it aside for a bit). But you get what I mean.
CCY: Thanks. I guess I have my habit of looking for the “right picture” (a process that takes a ridiculous amount of time, since I don’t stop at page 1 when browsing Danbooru) to blame for that. And that’s not a Shana parody! It’s DearS! ): You don’t worry about Tsukihime either, I’m going to finish at the very least one Near Side and one Far Side of the Moon before giving any more opinions.
Martin: Wonderful! “Git” has just the right amount of tsundere when used in that context with that emote! Great to hear that you like the new layout, I was planning on making the change for quite some time but didn’t know when to take off for a theme update + new header combo, so the outage helped me in that respect.
You’ll be surprised to see how different and great Negima is from LH (the disparity is heightened if you read them back to back), but I’ll leave the praise for later. Hope you weren’t slighted by my comments or anything, btw. As per my reply to Totali they definitely weren’t aimed at you of all people, who’s never made a post saying “brb busy IRL”, and who’s been able to post regularly on top of having a full-time job!
IKnight: Touché. Be right back while I scrub my brain with toilet cleaner.
March 31st, 2008 at 1:40 am
See, that, right there at the very beginning, the part about trying to cram an overused meme into another one and force a square (peg) joke into the circular (hole) anime where it doesn’t fit. That’s the kind of humour I meant was killing anime blogs left and right. It renders several posters articles all but unreadable and it’s becoming more and more rampant. I think it must have started on Derailed By Darry and that’s what I fear a lot of upstart bloggers are trying to strive too and one of the reasons I am trying to distance myself from a subsection of the community. I’m going to hang out with these types of blogs more often and see where things go from here. I think I’ll postpone that desire to throw in the towel and see if my impression of the community does not improve when I completely wall off the likes of Epicwin and Darkmirage.
Anway, all I know of Tsukihime is the anime (I only really play VN type games that also have a gameplay element to them so I passed on the game), which I found plodding and didn’t really go anywhere. I had heard the game was much better.
By the way when you are talking about the right brain-left brain between fans I presume you mean the argument between dialogue versus other forms of communication, right. I think like when you talke about the visual novel it’s important to get the balance between visual (right brain) and text (left brain) down. In that case, while I frequently prefer to use the left side of my brain more often (I am an avid reader after all), but when I’m playing visual novels I will only choose those that factor in the use of the right side of my brain (music I like, interactivity, stimulating visual etc). I find a lot of companies focus more on the left brain side of things, which is why my VN experience is basically limited to the likes of Alicesoft and Eushully (I am currently working on an article about this producer if people are interested) since otherwise I could just as easily sit down to a good old-fashioned off the shelf book when the visual part is dwarfed by the novel part anyway as I find it is in most games.