Jake

Idle Thumbs 265: A Chill Hell

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Consciously or not, I think it's part of the age-old "geek hierarchy" wherein people are drawn to using "lesser" mediums to conceptualize the less desirable aspects of their own preferred mediums. Art-film enthusiasts complain when an art film is too Hollywood, blockbuster enthusiasts complain when a movie is too video gamey, gaming enthusiasts complain when a video game is too anime, anime enthusiasts complain when an anime is too cartoony, and so on. It's a natural consequence of geek-adjacent communities defining themselves by how their favorite works are different from the rest, but it does lead to instances of accidental elitism all the time, which is too bad.

Anime is definitely used instead of something like 'over the top'. 

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Anime is definitely used instead of something like 'over the top'. 

 

And, honestly, I have zero problem with someone using "Dragonball Z" or "Akira" as adjectives to explain why something's too over-the-top (Twig will probably call me out for saying that, though). It's just that anime is so much bigger and so much more textured than whatever you caught on Adult Swim in the early 2000s. It's precisely the "Bleep Bloop, Whatever Happened to Pac-Man" literacy problem that video games suffered from in the broader culture space not even a decade ago.

 

 

EDIT: I'm actually going over how the use of mediums as adjectives for a situation gradually migrates from negative to positive as public awareness and literacy grows. "It's like something from a movie" means fake-but-in-a-good-way when a couple of generations ago it meant fake-but-in-a-bad-way. "Storybook ending" has been positive for decades if not centuries. "Something out of a video game" still has largely negative connotations of unreality but also some hints of freedom? I'm going to think more on this.

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At the same time, I think there is a definite sensibility to much anime that is very off-putting to people who haven't grown accustomed to it. I say this as a die-hard fan of slasher movies, so I understand loving and understanding something that most people write off. But my many attempts to get into anime (which have included many shows I collected by reading dozens of "Greatest animes of all time" lists and not just Adult Swim shows) have all been thwarted by a loose collection of traits such as:
 

  • overreliance on completely nonsensical mythology and magic McGuffins
  • a manic and childish sense of humor
  • an emphasis on children and adolescents
  • obnoxiously loud color design
  • an immature and occasionally misogynist approach to sexuality
  • characters who speak in philosopical vagueries instead of actually acting like human beings
  • characters whose faces explode into weird contortions for comic effect
  • a stubborn refusal to take place in any kind of world I could suspend my disbelief for
  • absolutely abysmal pacing
  • fate and destiny as essential plot motivators

 

Now I obviously wouldn't say that all these apply to all anime I've seen, and I bet most don't apply to most anime that exists. And I'd venture to guess that for anime fans, some of these are actually attractive instead of repulsive: in particular the sense of humor. But, as someone who has not watched a lot of anime as much as he's tried a lot to watch anime, when someone describes something as "anime-ish" some group of these traits is what I think of. It's more specific than "over-the-top" or "dumb", though both of those apply.

 

No matter what medium, genre, art movement, whatever, from the outside observer it will boil down to a certain set of traits. Imagine a music you don't listen to or like much. I imagine the same way I bounced off anime, someone could bounce off slasher movies because of a loose collection of traits such as:
 

  • overreliance on completely nonsensical psychology
  • two dimensional characters who only exist to be murdered
  • emphasis on adolescents
  • an immature and often misogynist approach to sexuality
  • an immature and often misanthropiic approach to violence
  • bad acting
  • predictable plots

 

to which I would say "Yeah, some of that is true of some of it, but that's only the surface of what's going on, there's more to it, there's nuance" but to which I would not say "Whhhhhhhat. Slasher movies aren't like that! Look at these two outliers, Psycho and The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears!" 

 

Also, I re-read the thread and unless someone edited their post, no one used anime as a literal one-to-one synonym for dumb.

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One of the biggest problems is that "anime" as a term encompasses, at the very least, the shounenshoujojosei, and seinen subgenres, basically the "four corners" of modern demographics. There is a lot of variance between Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (an absurdist seinen comedy), His and Her Circumstances (a shoujo romance), and Only Yesterday (a josei coming-of-age story). It sounds like you've watched a lot of shounen and "light" seinen anime, which isn't surprising if you've mostly been using "best of" lists to guide your viewing. The loudest voices on the internet are young, male, and overly nostalgic, so they dictate the content of those lists, just like Grand Theft Auto V, an absolutely awful game to me, is apparently the "best game of all time" according to a lot of publications I respect.

 

I don't mind people not liking anime. I just find the reflexive disdain ridiculous, especially the way that it's used to disparage low-quality works in other mediums, because there's so much anime and it's all so different. Saying that you hate anime isn't saying that you hate slasher movies, it's saying that you hate movies, full stop. That's fine, I know a few people who can't sit through a two-hour runtime of anything, but I wish the tendency were towards explaining that dislike with specificity rather than generalities. In the current cultural climate of video games, where people are saying, "I thought I didn't like video games, but then I discovered all these cool titles in the indie scene," it would be nice for other mediums to be accorded the same consideration. Five Centimeters a Second and The Tale of Princess Kaguya aren't random outliers, they're substantial works in the filmography of longtime industry veterans who are established in specific genres that don't typically get included in conversations about Cowboy Bebop and Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

 

Basically, I find it frustrating that anime is treated like a genre, with a shared set of themes and influences, when it's a medium with a lot more divergence than that. No one gets away with damning video games for the faults of FPSes or damning music for the faults of top 40 pop, but with anime... I don't know, I'm regretting this conversation. Use "anime" as a catch-all term for whatever, I'm sure it'll be fine.

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To be completely frank, the idea of someone defending the use of a word that represents an entire medium of entertainment as a pejorative is pretty absurd.

 

I'm honestly shocked that I would see so many words dedicated to such an argument. Especially on these forums!

 

Or maybe I should be the opposite of shocked at seeing in on these forums. I kinda bounce back and forth a lot lately...

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To get back to the Overwatch videos, I do agree they compare unfavorably to the TF2 promo videos. Blizzard take their lore so self-seriously whereas Valve know their game universes are ridiculous, and write stuff with an appropriately humorous touch that, from my perspective at least, is much more effective at bringing these characters to life.

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Saying that you hate anime isn't saying that you hate slasher movies, it's saying that you hate movies, full stop. 

 

To be pedantic (but hopefully for a purpose), it's more like saying you hate AMERICAN movies than saying you hate ALL movies. And people DO say that, and often you can easily infer that they really mean something slightly more specific (like "hollywood movies", or "blockbuster hollywood movies").

 

People are just working with the words they know, and can't be expected to do otherwise. Nobody who isn't an enthusiast (or a Japanese speaker) is going to know terms like shounen or seinen. The word they know is anime.

 

Part of the problem seems to be that we insist on using the word at all. We don't have a word for "Indian movie", we call them "Indian movies". If somebody doesn't like Bollywood movies, they don't have to resort to saying they don't like "Indian movies" because the word they know ("Bollywood") thankfully means something more specific than that. Anime, when we use it in English, just means "Japanese animation" and it's weird that somehow we've gotten to a place where we're using a loan word that way.

 

I don't know. I'm regretting this conversation. Use "anime" as a catch-all term for whatever, I'm sure it'll be fine.

 

Yeah I'm sure we've all taken part in this same conversation many many times; I'm kinda over it too.

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To get back to the Overwatch videos, I do agree they compare unfavorably to the TF2 promo videos. Blizzard take their lore so self-seriously whereas Valve know their game universes are ridiculous, and write stuff with an appropriately humorous touch that, from my perspective at least, is much more effective at bringing these characters to life.

 

Totally agree with this. But, that said, I really enjoy watching the result of Blizzard's cinematic team's excellent technical skills and animation, ususally reserved for the house-style gritty, "realistic" stuff, going nuts on a more simple, stylish characters and world. They're obviously having a lot of fun animating the characters (you can tell these guys were just waiting for an opportunity to do all that smearing and squash-and-stretch) and rendering that simple style as beautifully as possible.

 

What a weird choice to make the Soldier 76 short be the one with only one character in it, considering how boring he is.

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Those movies do look really really good, it must be said. I've only seen one (the Hanzo/Genji one) and the faces of the suited guard dudes getting knocked out were so good.

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To get back to the Overwatch videos, I do agree they compare unfavorably to the TF2 promo videos. Blizzard take their lore so self-seriously whereas Valve know their game universes are ridiculous, and write stuff with an appropriately humorous touch that, from my perspective at least, is much more effective at bringing these characters to life.

 

Hmm, i never liked the TF2 videos, though I can't exactly remember why.

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Totally agree with this. But, that said, I really enjoy watching the result of Blizzard's cinematic team's excellent technical skills and animation, ususally reserved for the house-style gritty, "realistic" stuff, going nuts on a more simple, stylish characters and world. They're obviously having a lot of fun animating the characters (you can tell these guys were just waiting for an opportunity to do all that smearing and squash-and-stretch) and rendering that simple style as beautifully as possible.

 

What a weird choice to make the Soldier 76 short be the one with only one character in it, considering how boring he is.

 

Yeah, I agree, just in terms of animation quality they are incredible. The writing just doesn't work for me (which I suppose is true for pretty much all of my experience with Blizzard games anyway). Kinda the same with a lot of SC2 cutscenes. Incredible cinematic detail, dumb as bricks writing.

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Yeah, I agree, just in terms of animation quality they are incredible. The writing just doesn't work for me (which I suppose is true for pretty much all of my experience with Blizzard games anyway). Kinda the same with a lot of SC2 cutscenes. Incredible cinematic detail, dumb as bricks writing.

Just glad the fate of the universe isn't a stake, as well as not introducing ridiculous mythology ala SC2

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Chris, you said the chainsaw was the feature you never used, but did you ever use grenades? I completely forgot about them as soon as they were introduced, and I only remembered they existed when I'd idly click the middle mouse button and throw one at my feet. I think they have a use for when you need to drop something and run away from a tough enemy, but I found they got in the way of the flow of combat too much to ever be useful.

Siphon grenade + Rich get Richer rune. When fully upgraded, the rune grants you infinite ammo if your armor is 75 or above. Siphon grenades recharge armor if your health is already topped up. I spent a large chunk of the final boss fight with the heavy assault rifle's micromissiles launching in an endless stream.

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To be completely frank, the idea of someone defending the use of a word that represents an entire medium of entertainment as a pejorative is pretty absurd.

 

I'm honestly shocked that I would see so many words dedicated to such an argument. Especially on these forums!

 

Or maybe I should be the opposite of shocked at seeing in on these forums. I kinda bounce back and forth a lot lately...

 

Given I was one of the people who listened and commented to Keyframes for several weeks, I'd hope you'd give me more credit than that? Or at least not insinuate I'm part of the reason the message boards are bad lately? I was explaining that, accurate or not, describing something as "anime" means something much more specific than just "dumb" or "over the top". That's it. Right or wrong, the reason I dedicated so many words is specifically so no one would think I was being dismissive of anime or people who like it.

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Siphon grenade + Rich get Richer rune. When fully upgraded, the rune grants you infinite ammo if your armor is 75 or above. Siphon grenades recharge armor if your health is already topped up. I spent a large chunk of the final boss fight with the heavy assault rifle's micromissiles launching in an endless stream.

 

I actually didn't know that and had to try it out.  You only get armor from siphon grenades if you also have the Equipment Power rune equipped.

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Given I was one of the people who listened and commented to Keyframes for several weeks, I'd hope you'd give me more credit than that? Or at least not insinuate I'm part of the reason the message boards are bad lately? I was explaining that, accurate or not, describing something as "anime" means something much more specific than just "dumb" or "over the top". That's it. Right or wrong, the reason I dedicated so many words is specifically so no one would think I was being dismissive of anime or people who like it.

 

I guess my issue is that "anime" means a lot of things and that its generally accepted usage as a pejorative has transformed the term into a moving target that shifts with each individual's experience and opinion of the medium while still casting a chilling effect over discussion and reception of the medium itself. Something gets called "anime" to describe what's wrong with it: The Matrix gets called "anime" only if one doesn't like it, while no one's copping to the heavy influence of Paprika on Inception or Jungle Emperor Leo on Lion King. The bad stuff is foreign, the good stuff is innate.

 

It's also just a usage that badly lacks precision. For instance, I just watched a couple of Overwatch videos (which didn't suit me at all) and crossed out the elements on your list that I didn't notice:

 

  • overreliance on completely nonsensical mythology and magic McGuffins
  • a manic and childish sense of humor
  • an emphasis on children and adolescents
  • obnoxiously loud color design
  • an immature and occasionally misogynist approach to sexuality
  • characters who speak in philosopical vagueries instead of actually acting like human beings
  • characters whose faces explode into weird contortions for comic effect
  • a stubborn refusal to take place in any kind of world I could suspend my disbelief for
  • absolutely abysmal pacing
  • fate and destiny as essential plot motivators

 

The pared-down (yet still generously interpreted) version of this list of traits doesn't really make me think of anime, not even "anime" interpreted through the holy triad of Cowboy Bebop, Akira, and Dragonball. It makes me think of big-budget video games. However, we can't really critique or qualify a video game by describing it as a video game, so we describe it as something adjacent and hope that the overlap helps others to find our meaning. Like Dium said, I don't expect someone who's largely ignorant of the genre to use anything but the words they know to describe something, but it's a strange feeling to have someone functionally defending that ignorance when people try to complicate it.

 

Anyway, we're recording an episode of Key Frames where we discuss Natsuyuki Rendezvous, a josei supernatural romance the list for which looks like this:

 

  • overreliance on completely nonsensical mythology and magic McGuffins
  • a manic and childish sense of humor
  • an emphasis on children and adolescents
  • obnoxiously loud color design
  • an immature and occasionally misogynist approach to sexuality
  • characters who speak in philosopical vagueries instead of actually acting like human beings
  • characters whose faces explode into weird contortions for comic effect
  • a stubborn refusal to take place in any kind of world I could suspend my disbelief for
  • absolutely abysmal pacing
  • fate and destiny as essential plot motivators

 

I hated it anyway, because one member of the love triangle is a sack of human garbage and that makes the pacing beyond abysmal, but it's very different from the abovementioned "holy triad" and that's part of what we're trying to do with our podcast. Please tune in, everybody: http://www.keyframespodcast.com/

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The problem is these shorthand terms are only really useful when you are actually talking about a work in the medium/genre the term applies to. Jake made a comment in this weeks show where he called Doom "a game ass game" and similarly I've heard Gorm call a show a "anime ass anime".

 

It's important when someone calls out the ridiculousness of a genre works use of well understood tropes that its clearly not being talked of as the totally of a medium and that you have both a audience and a speaker who have a affection for and understanding of a medium, and honestly i think Gorm and Twig are being to harsh on Patrick R because clearly he makes a distinction between his gut reaction to the term as a outsider and his knowledge that is not the entirety of it.

 

I've seen a similar thing happening in the last week or so in reviews of the Warcraft movie, now don't get me wrong the film has a butt load of flaws and problems but a good few critics have just used "video gameness" as a easy stick to beat it with rather than actually talk about it's very real failures in storytelling or cinematography. 

 

I think the reaction to Chris using anime as a shorthand results in the same thing, it wasn't particularly terrible, it was just a little lazy and didn't actually inform us what he felt the problem with the videos was. 

 

Now to talk about the Overwatch shorts!  My instinct is to be similarly lazy and to say its like "dreamworks" (technically incredibly accomplished but with a overly self serious but sickly artificial sentimentality) does a "avengers" fight sequence (action centred far more around the showing off the combatants abilities rather than tension or drama).

 

Blizzard has a reputation for over polishing things but honestly that doesn't feel like the problem here, its simply just not good use of the limits of short films. Trying to world build and set up clear emotion character motivations in 5 minutes is a ambitious choice to put it kindly, shorts are instead often at their best when they concentrate on creating a self contained moment something the TF 2 shorts did exceptionally well.

 

my favourite of which remains

 

the truly strange thing is that their trailer for Tracer in Heroes of the storm actually gets allot of that stuff right

 

 

showing us her character and quirks rather than attempting to shoehorn a whole story in.

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Given I was one of the people who listened and commented to Keyframes for several weeks, I'd hope you'd give me more credit than that? Or at least not insinuate I'm part of the reason the message boards are bad lately? I was explaining that, accurate or not, describing something as "anime" means something much more specific than just "dumb" or "over the top". That's it. Right or wrong, the reason I dedicated so many words is specifically so no one would think I was being dismissive of anime or people who like it.

I insinuated no such thing!

 

And, c'mon, I could find tons of anime series or movies that have few or none of the things in your list. I could also find tons of non-anime series or movies (or games (or whatevers)) that have most or all of those qualities and yet are very obviously not at all inspired by anime - and many of which, in fact, existed before anime was even a big thing over here in the west.

 

I don't understand why it's even worth defending it! I'm not hugely upset about people using the word "anime" like this, as it's so common I kind of have to just let it slide in most cases (such as The Internet at Large), but I figured it'd be okay to bring it up here and essentially say "hey maybe don't please!" without a response essentially saying "hey them's the breaks kid!".

 

I also think it's silly to compare anime (a medium of entertainment from a specific region of the world) to a slasher films (a genre). I suppose you could argue "Japanese animation is a genre", but that's where I'd exit the argument, laughing silently to myself as words lose all meaning forever.

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I insinuated no such thing!

 

Sure, whatever. More than anything I just want this conversation to be over. I already stated exactly how I felt and then stated why I stated that.

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There are some tropes that just show up a lot in anime more than other mediums. Lots of mediums have that. Like if I said "that's totally an adventure game" referring to something that was not literally an adventure game but relied on a bunch of overwrought lateral thinking constructs or too-cheeky-and-winky-and-self-aware-for-its-own-good writing and characters, people would jump down my throat and present a lot of one off examples of wonderful subtle art in the adventure game genre... but also my comparison would still be totally valid and descriptive shorthand because a ton ton ton of adventure games carry those tropes and give that genre its reputation. There's no need to defend anime.

-

Oops I was a page behind so ignore all that. Except the last part about letting go of the need to defend anime (as a person who spent what seems like a decade defending adventure games).

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I'm not defending anime. People can like or dislike it all they want; that's their prerogative as human beings with opinions. I'm only trying to get people to stop using the word "anime" to describe "bad things". I don't think that's unreasonable.

 

Although if I'd known it was going to blow up into this weird controversial thing I would've just closed the thread without mentioning it!

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I think saying people were using the word simply to mean "bad" (when I'm pretty sure people were using it as shorthand for some common, if negative, traits associated with anime) is reductive and unnecessarily defensive. People do that for a lot of things, positive and negative. But whatever you're right, sorry for continuing to talk about it.

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Well, if it's any consolation, I feel the same way about most shorthand, positive or negative! But anime already has like The Worst reputation, and I think it is (sort of) undeserved, so in that sense I suppose I was/am embracing the spirit of defensiveness because I tire of seeing anime be the butt of the joke all the goshdang time. Less so around here, but you know, death by a thousand cuts, etc.

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