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With regards to seemingly exploitative visual elements in KILL la KILL, it's the sort of thing to which you have to be acclimated even to see the subversiveness. I didn't like it until I noticed that every character, male or female and young or old, got the same trashy "magical girl" transformation effect when it made sense, so the anime's mostly egalitarian in its sleaze. I personally love the teacher for being the typical GAINAX coach character from Gunbuster, only covered inch-deep in post-2000s hyper-sexualization. Still, with a lot of the characters, there's a real battle going on thematically between the male gaze and nudity as empowerment that I really can't tackle if I don't watch the show at least one more time (which might be years, since I wanted to wait until I got the Blu-rays and RightStuf's not going to have a sale for at least half a year).

 

However, I can say for sure that the themes and motifs of sexual abuse don't go anywhere. They're just to reassure you that a character is entirely evil and therefore worthy of your hate. I think it's a pretty egregious misstep, but then so much of KILL la KILL was made up on the fly, I'm not at all surprised that there's this one lazy and tired piece of semi-offensive storytelling stuck in there somewhere.

 

I do see some of what you're talking about. The sexualization by itself isn't necessarily what bothers me. And I think it's great that literally all of the strongest characters, hero and villain, are all female. I just don't know what to make of the message it seems to be sending that "to be powerful and badass, you have to look as sexy as possible".

In the first couple episodes, Ryuko doesn't feel comfortable stripping down to almost nothing when she synchronizes and having everyone ogle her. But inevitably, she is forced to accept and embrace it if she wants to be powerful enough to kick everyone's ass. I think that can easily be construed as a negative message. Something like "If you aren't comfortable being dressed really provocatively and having people constantly ogle you, then you are weak. Accept it and embrace it and that makes you strong."

 

Then there's the weird part where her adoptive family gets all rich and everyone grows distant. There's a scene where she's in the bath and looks out the window in the hopes that the father, son, and dog are spying on her like they used to. It's bad enough that she has to constantly put up with peeping toms in her own adoptive family trying to see her naked, but then when they stop doing it she realizes she actually misses constantly being violated. I have a hard time seeing anything subversive about that. To me, it basically looks like they are saying that that kind of behavior is totally acceptable because girls like it even if they don't think they like it.

 

And then there are all the implications of rape and molestation.

 

To me, it feels like there are quite a few missteps that make this show feel less like it is being subversive and more like it is just being pervy. Although I recognize that I still don't have a lot of exposure to anime so maybe the things I am griping about have some element on a deeper level that I am missing.

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During one of the episode breaks, Nick started reading the booklet for the Blu-ray, which Chris had on his shelf of Blu-rays and PS3 games that they'd often look at or talk about. He cracked up over the "hypersonic effect," a crackpot theory by Akira's sound-designer-cum-behavioral-scientist, and they spent a while talking about what it would sound like:

The thing that I've always wondered is, Chris seems really unimpressed by anime, but that first-printing Bandai release was goddamn hard to get! There were only like five thousand copies before they cut costs with a cheaper case and no booklet. Did Chris just get lucky, or does he really like Akira?

Chris secretly has a Vagabond omnibus and Ghost in the Shell figurines under his bed, and forgot to hide his most prized possession.

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The thing that I've always wondered is, Chris seems really unimpressed by anime, but that first-printing Bandai release was goddamn hard to get! There were only like five thousand copies before they cut costs with a cheaper case and no booklet. Did Chris just get lucky, or does he really like Akira?

Yeah, I'm surprised it's his. I thought I specifically read in another anime thread we used to have that Chris did not like Akira because it still had typical anime tropes from that time like floating rocks, hair that stands up with power, etc. Or were they typical before Akira? I don't know. Dragon Ball Z comes to mind.

 

The Bandai release is utterly useless though. It's bare bones and the Funimation has most of the stuff from the Pioneer DVD release, if not all. I think it's missing the storyboards? I don't own it yet so I'm not sure, but that doesn't matter because I have the books of them. One thing I want to watch with that release is the original dub where Liquid Snake is Kaneda, as I have never heard it. I have heard clips where is sounds super stilted which is odd because all of these people ended up doing a lot of professional voice acting for recognizable characters. Jan Rabsen is Tetsuo who is also known as Leisure Suit Larry, which is fucking hilarious.

 

Alamo just showed the original voices with subs since the presenter made a big deal on the prerecorded vocal track (although he claimed animation hadn't really done that much before Akira, perhaps he just meant in Japan). I haven't seen the newer dub but I've heard clips and it generally just sounds like everything I hate about low budget anime dubs with non union actors. At least Funimation didn't redub it with their garbage work.

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Kill La Kill:

Gormongous hit it pretty well. There's no question that Ryuko's sexualization is potentially problematic. It has to be remembered that Japanese society is much, much more sexist than the US, and so what's problematic in our eyes could be potentially progressive from their point of view.

 

I think it's possible that there's a 90's-grrl power thing going on. It's not that Ryuko can only be powerful by dressing provocatively, it's an acknowledgement that women DO have a unique power in their sexuality, and that power can't be unlocked until she's willing to accept it as a part of herself. It's a kind of sex-positive message in that interpretation. It's similar to arguments you can make about Bayonetta. Is it still problematic and sexist? Yeah. Is it also empowering? Kinda.

 

I have a theory that I haven't really fleshed out that much of the magical-girl type stuff is a deliberate attempt to update those tropes into modern sensibilities in a way that recovers some of the power and shock that existed when the tropes were introduced. When Sailormoon was conceived, the sailor outfits were tied up with heady mix of baggage about modernity, foreign-ness, and sexuality in a way that's no longer really resonant. The "uniforms" in Kill La Kill are a way of reclaiming some of the sense of sexualization in a modern atmosphere where it's become very difficult to shock people with sexuality. (I'm not saying that Sailormoon's outfits were as controversial at the time as Ryuko's outfits are today, because I can't back that up with research. But that is the direction I'm looking in.)

 

Even the introduction of Senketsu (forcing itself onto Ryuko) brings up some potential questions about the role of women and sexualization in fashion and in the sailor-uniform trope in anime and the real world.

 

 

 

The episode where Mako's family becomes rich is primarily meant as a class criticism, and any gender messages in that episode are, if not entirely incidental, at least partially. The idea that her family would be perverted and peep on her is built on a trope, but you aren't missing much there. The point is simply that instead of doing something together by creeping on  her, they're creeping on strangers in a hostess club, and at least when they were poor they were poor _together_.

 

It's also the most in-depth look at the school-town's society, where standard of living is literally directly derived from your social standing and success in high school. Which is incredibly on the nose, but still a fantastic critique of Japanese society.

 

i.e. sure, the peeping tom stuff is problematic if you read it that closely, but I don't think there was any intent to communicate that message.

 

Anime doesn't really survive close reading the way that a lot of western cultural products do. There's a tendency for a thing to be many things at once (i.e. to be a commercial product, an artistic statement, a critique of that genre, and a parody of that genre) that makes it very difficult to tease out a single through-line of intent or meaning.

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I think those are all fair counter-points to my criticisms. I guess it comes back to what seems to get discussed a lot on these forums: authorial intent versus audience interpretation. From my point of view, it's kind of hard to swallow all of these potentially problematic elements as not problematic unless you're well versed in what they are subverting. Maybe all of this is painfully obvious to Japanese viewers and it is progressive as hell, in which case I guess my interpretation isn't fair since I'm going in completely uninformed.

 

There's a weird disconnect I have with feminism where on the one hand, it seems like people are quick to condemn a piece of work like The Avengers because of one or two perceived missteps in Black Widow's character arc (where I see her character as one of the more progressive representations of women in media). Then on the other hand you have a show like this that people claim is progressive and sex positive even though it is rife with what I see as a bunch of really problematic stuff. It's just hard to reconcile these two viewpoints (and I recognize it isn't necessarily the same people praising one work and condemning the other). Also CLWheeljack, I don't mean to imply that you are necessarily making these claims and I recognize you are just presenting a different interpretation that others may have.

 

And one other key thing that makes it really hard for me to buy the whole "sex positive" angle of this show:

The only reason Ryuko has to learn to feel comfortable being near naked to begin with is because her pervert father purposely designed the outfit to be as sexually provocative as possible.

 

Oh silly dads and their silly obsession with naked women. Might as well not fight it and just learn to enjoy it.

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I think those are all fair counter-points to my criticisms. I guess it comes back to what seems to get discussed a lot on these forums: authorial intent versus audience interpretation. From my point of view, it's kind of hard to swallow all of these potentially problematic elements as not problematic unless you're well versed in what they are subverting. Maybe all of this is painfully obvious to Japanese viewers and it is progressive as hell, in which case I guess my interpretation isn't fair since I'm going in completely uninformed.

 

There's a weird disconnect I have with feminism where on the one hand, it seems like people are quick to condemn a piece of work like The Avengers because of one or two perceived missteps in Black Widow's character arc (where I see her character as one of the more progressive representations of women in media). Then on the other hand you have a show like this that people claim is progressive and sex positive even though it is rife with what I see as a bunch of really problematic stuff. It's just hard to reconcile these two viewpoints (and I recognize it isn't necessarily the same people praising one work and condemning the other). Also CLWheeljack, I don't mean to imply that you are necessarily making these claims and I recognize you are just presenting a different interpretation that others may have.

 

And one other key thing that makes it really hard for me to buy the whole "sex positive" angle of this show:

The only reason Ryuko has to learn to feel comfortable being near naked to begin with is because her pervert father purposely designed the outfit to be as sexually provocative as possible.

 

Oh silly dads and their silly obsession with naked women. Might as well not fight it and just learn to enjoy it.

 

I mean, your reaction to KILL la KILL is totally valid. Just because there's a non-problematic interpretation of the show's thematic elements doesn't mean it's the correct interpretation or even the dominant one. Even if KILL la KILL is speaking to a very specific core of viewers with the appropriate level of knowledge, it's still broadcast and marketed as a mass-media product, and honestly I think it doesn't always follow through on the premises of its various themes, like with your spoiler (the effect of fathers, especially absent ones, on female sexuality). I'm probably just going to recommend the same thing I recommended to Blambo with moe: if you don't like it and it's making you uncomfortable, no one (besides possibly Twig) will give you shit for jumping ship. We've all bailed on anime that's not necessarily terrible but still rubs us the wrong way. Life's short, watch something that gets you going.

 

Chris secretly has a Vagabond omnibus and Ghost in the Shell figurines under his bed, and forgot to hide his most prized possession.

 

I thought that I had zero desire to own any PVC figurines from anime, but I came across this one from Bakemonogatari that is awesome enough to be tempting, if it didn't cost $190:

 

512fYua4-7L.jpg

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(besides possibly Twig)

DANG.

 

I like that figure a lot actually except for the part where her panties are meticulously sculpted along with the rest of her. It unfortunately brings the rest of it all the way down. That's pretty much where I draw the line with Rad Figures or Statues or Whatever. I don't want to put anything on my shelves that's explicitly and emphatically sexualized. 

 

I do realize there's no way to make that figure in that setup without either looking awkward (solid black beneath skirt, it's been done and looks bad) or just going the whole hog. But of course an anime figure is going to go the whole hog.

 

I did totally buy a (Young) Son Goku figure from Crunchyroll a while back, though, 'cause it was on sale (and super cheap). It uh... never showed up, though. It was a preorder but I expected it to show up by now... *investigates*

 

edit:

 

"It looks like the expected ship date for your pre-order is 8/31."

 

lol i definitely did not realize it was so far out

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Even though Kill la Kill put me off Hiroyuki Imaishi forever, it's success sure makes his 50+ art books sell well on ebay by putting that in every title.. Precious money.

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Well, the "dirty old man" trope is very well established in both anime and Japanese culture in general. It's got slightly more to it than just slapstick. It speaks to what a culture built around maintaining the structures of masculinity and virility does to men who no longer exist along that axis.

Also, wasn't there a plot justification about minimizing contact with human skin?

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To be clear I'm trying to never prescriptively say that anything with moe is bad. The reason why I always talk about it is because it has very specific, strongly evocative qualities, positive or negative, that shouldn't be ignored and can't be ignored by people who don't really watch that much anime, and because relegating it to a personal preference feels like pushing a valid criticism under the carpet. I don't hate all moe, so my not liking it in one instance isn't my being generally uncomfortable with the trope, it's usually due to its composition with the rest of the show.

I like potato chips and will on occasion sit down and eat a whole bag, but I don't want to have it with all of my meals.

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To be clear I'm trying to never prescriptively say that anything with moe is bad. The reason why I always talk about it is because it has very specific, strongly evocative qualities, positive or negative, that shouldn't be ignored and can't be ignored by people who don't really watch that much anime, and because relegating it to a personal preference feels like pushing a valid criticism under the carpet. I don't hate all moe, so my not liking it in one instance isn't my being generally uncomfortable with the trope, it's usually due to its composition with the rest of the show.

I like potato chips and will on occasion sit down and eat a whole bag, but I don't want to have it with all of my meals.

 

Sorry, I misspoke. What I meant is that Japanese anime has a lot of aesthetic and thematic baggage that is unpleasant or unpalatable for perfectly normal reasons, even when used purposefully and expertly, so if the use of moe or other exploitative sexualities in any one show is bothering you, me, or anyone else, it's probably better to ditch it in favor of something you have a chance of enjoying, rather than keep digging unless that anime is Neon Genesis Evangelion.

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unless that anime is Neon Genesis Evangelion

in which case you should run for the hills and never look back

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in which case you should run for the hills and never look back

 

I mean, whatever you think of Evangelion, it's one of a handful of shows about which I thought in response to CLWheeljack saying, probably more rightly than I'd like, that anime doesn't really survive a close read like some older and more mature mediums. Neon Genesis EvangelionRevolutionary Girl UtenaHaibane RenmeiFLCLMushishi... There's a few, but they have to begin with a love of obscurity and ambiguity, otherwise the limitless nature of the anime medium tends to wear down their subtlety.

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I mean, your reaction to KILL la KILL is totally valid. Just because there's a non-problematic interpretation of the show's thematic elements doesn't mean it's the correct interpretation or even the dominant one. Even if KILL la KILL is speaking to a very specific core of viewers with the appropriate level of knowledge, it's still broadcast and marketed as a mass-media product, and honestly I think it doesn't always follow through on the premises of its various themes, like with your spoiler (the effect of fathers, especially absent ones, on female sexuality). I'm probably just going to recommend the same thing I recommended to Blambo with moe: if you don't like it and it's making you uncomfortable, no one (besides possibly Twig) will give you shit for jumping ship. We've all bailed on anime that's not necessarily terrible but still rubs us the wrong way. Life's short, watch something that gets you going.

 

Haha, I think I got a little too fired up there and gave the impression that I don't like the show. It's quite the opposite actually. There's too much awesome stuff that it's doing for me to drop it because of this one aspect I'm not too fond of. I'm definitely going to finish it and it will probably end up near the top of my list of favorites despite my frustration with the pervy aspects.

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Mushishi definitely doesn't have a non-nebulous overarching theme, but each episode has a lot of content to dig into. I still have yet to watch the last five episodes though.

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Mushishi is one of the few I think actually is so unlike the rest of anime it stands on its own. I may be wrong about that. And I'm obviously super biased!!!!!

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Haha, I think I got a little too fired up there and gave the impression that I don't like the show. It's quite the opposite actually. There's too much awesome stuff that it's doing for me to drop it because of this one aspect I'm not too fond of. I'm definitely going to finish it and it will probably end up near the top of my list of favorites despite my frustration with the pervy aspects.

 

We're probably on the same page, then! Honestly, most of my intense love of GAINAX and post-GAINAX stuff has the same conflicted relationship.

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Haha, I think I got a little too fired up there and gave the impression that I don't like the show. It's quite the opposite actually. There's too much awesome stuff that it's doing for me to drop it because of this one aspect I'm not too fond of. I'm definitely going to finish it and it will probably end up near the top of my list of favorites despite my frustration with the pervy aspects.

 

Haha it's okay. Never forget that anime sucks.

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I mean, whatever you think of Evangelion, it's one of a handful of shows about which I thought in response to CLWheeljack saying, probably more rightly than I'd like, that anime doesn't really survive a close read like some older and more mature mediums. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Haibane Renmei, FLCL, Mushishi... There's a few, but they have to begin with a love of obscurity and ambiguity, otherwise the limitless nature of the anime medium tends to wear down their subtlety.

Wait, is your contention that those titles do stand up to close scrutiny? Or that they don't? I don't really understand your comment here, but I think it's just the phrasing.

Either way, I'm not sure the relative maturity of the medium is relevant here. I think that anime is fairly mature as a medium, but uniformity of message just isn't something that the medium values.

Anime is a fundamentally foreign medium from a distinct culture with distinct goals. It feels familiar due to appropriation and ubiquity, but i think it's a mistake to treat it as though westerners can consume and interpret it devoid of that context.

Sorry if this sounds kind of pompous.

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Wait, is your contention that those titles do stand up to close scrutiny? Or that they don't? I don't really understand your comment here, but I think it's just the phrasing.

Either way, I'm not sure the relative maturity of the medium is relevant here. I think that anime is fairly mature as a medium, but uniformity of message just isn't something that the medium values.

Anime is a fundamentally foreign medium from a distinct culture with distinct goals. It feels familiar due to appropriation and ubiquity, but i think it's a mistake to treat it as though westerners can consume and interpret it devoid of that context.

Sorry if this sounds kind of pompous.

 

Honestly I agree with this, though I don't think that reflects the absolute depth of the medium. There are universal aspects to anime that anyone can enjoy but unless you're Japanese or have been immersed in or studied the culture for a long time, I don't think that you can 100% enjoy or even criticize anime from the intended perspective, or at least that aspect severely hampers serious interpretation. There's value in experiencing something while being an outsider (that story about the dark souls guy Miyazaki having a very specific experience while reading Lord of the Rings with limited english capabilities is an example) but forgetting that position is like saying "this element of some other culture is what I think it is", which borders on appropriative.

 

Also I'm willing to bet that any random /a/ browsing westerner who says they enjoy Lucky Star or Joshiraku for anything other than the moe is probably not being entirely honest with themselves. I certainly wasn't.

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Wait, is your contention that those titles do stand up to close scrutiny? Or that they don't? I don't really understand your comment here, but I think it's just the phrasing.

Either way, I'm not sure the relative maturity of the medium is relevant here. I think that anime is fairly mature as a medium, but uniformity of message just isn't something that the medium values.

Anime is a fundamentally foreign medium from a distinct culture with distinct goals. It feels familiar due to appropriation and ubiquity, but i think it's a mistake to treat it as though westerners can consume and interpret it devoid of that context.

Sorry if this sounds kind of pompous.

Honestly I agree with this, though I don't think that reflects the absolute depth of the medium. There are universal aspects to anime that anyone can enjoy but unless you're Japanese or have been immersed in or studied the culture for a long time, I don't think that you can 100% enjoy or even criticize anime from the intended perspective, or at least that aspect severely hampers serious interpretation. There's value in experiencing something while being an outsider (that story about the dark souls guy Miyazaki having a very specific experience while reading Lord of the Rings with limited english capabilities is an example) but forgetting that position is like saying "this element of some other culture is what I think it is", which borders on appropriative.

 

Also I'm willing to bet that any random /a/ browsing westerner who says they enjoy Lucky Star or Joshiraku for anything other than the moe is probably not being entirely honest with themselves. I certainly wasn't.

 

I mean, context is always going to be part of a creative work, so something is definitely lost when there is an inability to comprehend it in full, but there are many kinds of media from foreign cultures with foreign values that have some unique resonance with our own culture apart from appropriative familiarity: Greek epics, Roman poetry, French romances, Italian theatre, Indian songs, Russian novels... All of these examples have something that is absent from and inaccessible by a strictly anglophone background, but isn't the entire premise of art that there's something intrinsic there anyway, which is worthy of discussion if not to be preferred over a full analysis of the work itself? Are the people who consume, study, and love these things, along with Japanese anime, wasting their time because they're not privy to some arbitrary threshold of conscious or unconscious intent by the author?* Am I making a fool out of myself when I say that Dream of the Red Chamber is my favorite literary work, when I'm not Chinese, an aristocrat, or from the eighteenth century and therefore share nothing in common with the context of the novel? I'm not sure I find myself agreeing at all. Well, I may be a fool, I can't deny that. Also, if you're saying that a creative work can't be enjoyed (or can't be "100% enjoyed," whatever that means)** outside of the specific moment of its cultural context, you're basically saying that it's ephemera, confined to and defined by a specific moment, which is equally if not more reductive and dismissive to it as a product of a culture.

 

Sorry, I know I'm overstating my case here, but it's been really weird for us to go from "KILL la KILL is a thematically confused anime, even among fans" to "all anime is thematically confused, it's characteristic of Japanese media culture and Western enjoyment of it as coherent is actually appropriation" in twenty-four hours, especially when we blew past a list of five thematically dense but coherent anime (at least two with outspoken auteurs for creators) that it took me all of fifteen seconds to throw together off the top of my head.

 

 

 

* I can't find a place to put this, but "uniformity of message" could just as easily be said to be something that anglophone TV and movies doesn't value either, if you take the average work. How uniform is the message in Avengers: Age of Ultron or The Walking Dead, which are critically acclaimed yet thematically confused works? Is our context as a Western audience of particular use to us here?

 

** I used to stress out that I didn't and couldn't get all the references in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, until I read a couple interviews with native Japanese fans who said that they didn't get a majority of the jokes but liked how dense the show was packed with them. It helped me to realize that Kumeta and Shinbo were just throwing as much stuff as they could up on the screen in the hopes that there'll be something somewhere to make everyone laugh, even me. Understanding and enjoying something "100%" is sometimes unfeasible or undesirable for an informed member of the audience.

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I thought that I had zero desire to own any PVC figurines from anime, but I came across this one from Bakemonogatari that is awesome enough to be tempting, if it didn't cost $190:

 

hitagi.jpg

 

I have this fig. One day I knocked it over and now I'm missing a bunch of stationery bits. So I use the other variant where she's just holding staplers. Well boring.

 

Talking about Kill La Kill, there's a really cool fig coming out that I've already shamelessly pre-ordered (spoiler + NSFW):

 

Senketsu_Kisaragi_2.jpg

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I mean, context is always going to be part of a creative work, so something is definitely lost when there is an inability to comprehend it in full, but there are many kinds of media from foreign cultures with foreign values that have some unique resonance with our own culture apart from appropriative familiarity: Greek epics, Roman poetry, French romances, Italian theatre, Indian songs, Russian novels... All of these examples have something that is absent from and inaccessible by a strictly anglophone background, but isn't the entire premise of art that there's something intrinsic there anyway, which is worthy of discussion if not to be preferred over a full analysis of the work itself? Are the people who consume, study, and love these things, along with Japanese anime, wasting their time because they're not privy to some arbitrary threshold of conscious or unconscious intent by the author?* Am I making a fool out of myself when I say that Dream of the Red Chamber is my favorite literary work, when I'm not Chinese, an aristocrat, or from the eighteenth century and therefore share nothing in common with the context of the novel? I'm not sure I find myself agreeing at all. Well, I may be a fool, I can't deny that. Also, if you're saying that a creative work can't be enjoyed (or can't be "100% enjoyed," whatever that means)** outside of the specific moment of its cultural context, you're basically saying that it's ephemera, confined to and defined by a specific moment, which is equally if not more reductive and dismissive to it as a product of a culture.

Sorry, I know I'm overstating my case here, but it's been really weird for us to go from "KILL la KILL is a thematically confused anime, even among fans" to "all anime is thematically confused, it's characteristic of Japanese media culture and Western enjoyment of it as coherent is actually appropriation" in twenty-four hours, especially when we blew past a list of five thematically dense but coherent anime (at least two with outspoken auteurs for creators) that it took me all of fifteen seconds to throw together off the top of my head.

* I can't find a place to put this, but "uniformity of message" could just as easily be said to be something that anglophone TV and movies doesn't value either, if you take the average work. How uniform is the message in Avengers: Age of Ultron or The Walking Dead, which are critically acclaimed yet thematically confused works? Is our context as a Western audience of particular use to us here?

** I used to stress out that I didn't and couldn't get all the references in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, until I read a couple interviews with native Japanese fans who said that they didn't get a majority of the jokes but liked how dense the show was packed with them. It helped me to realize that Kumeta and Shinbo were just throwing as much stuff as they could up on the screen in the hopes that there'll be something somewhere to make everyone laugh, even me. Understanding and enjoying something "100%" is sometimes unfeasible or undesirable for an informed member of the audience.

I don't think we're disagreeing in any meaningful way. Anime or any exported art can be enjoyed to the fullest extent by any individual in their own cultural context because there's no platonic ideal of how or how much a thing should be enjoyed, but that's separate from criticizing and enjoying it in its intended cultural context, which has value on its own.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to enjoy foreign art just because you're not a PhD in Japanese Media Studies, I'm saying that there are specific instances where it's impossible to understand it 100% in every way it was intended, especially in media as targeted and niche marketed as anime is. Sure the author dies with the birth of a piece but the farther you are from its intended audience the more likely you are to miss bits and pieces of authored things specific to a culture, whether it's as crass as a pop culture reference or as subtle as a cultural ideology. There's a limit in breadth and depth of how you interpret something foreign as a result, and I'm not saying that this fact should stop anyone from watching something foreign to their own cultural background, since the whole point is to broaden your cultural boundaries and redefine your identity and thought process. These limits don't mean that you can't sit down and enjoy anime as a westerner, since people obviously do, but like you seemed to indicate, the qualities that you're likely to enjoy it for on at first glance are universal. You won't get the benefit of getting a prereflective reptile brain enjoyment of elements not specific to your culture. Doing research may improve your enjoyment of the piece retroactively and also help you enjoy future pieces but that effort alone should indicate that there's a boundary, or at least a gradient. I'm saying that not being aware of this or ignoring this borders on appropriative because you're potentially misrepresenting a culture by stating an interpretation meant to be internally consistent within the context of this culture that isn't your own. I'm not saying that interpreting foreign media is per se appropriative, I'm saying it depends on your frame of mind.

The answer to your Dream of the Red Chamber question is "no but that's not the issue here".

Paranoia agent is a good example.

its themes about paranoia and pathological blame shifting in modern society are universal, but the kawaiisa aspect and the cultural weight of the atomic bomb are not something non Japanese people ever experience. At most you can make a 6th grade reading comprehension connection but there is no visceral response to the overarching motifs of the show because you've never lived in this society.

At best you can infer its cultural context but you can't feel it on first glance when images flash on the screen, and even when you do a reflective analysis on the work and attempt to assess its coherence with your analysis, you have no barometer for whether or not this foreign cultural thing is effective to you.

Also I didn't mean to indicate that anime is universally incoherent or that attributing coherence to it is a western invention or whatever. Though, cynically, it's pretty obvious that depending on marketing factors or economics, choices in a lot of media will be made despite coherency or moral goal simply because it must pander to every inch of its audience to survive. The economics of the anime industry seem specifically susceptible to this, too. I think that this must be something that people are aware of. I think it's OK for some things to be treated as products if there's no valid arrangement of a piece where it's considered coherent.

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Sorry about the fairly extreme pivot, it's something I've thinking about a lot, but never really mentioned because it never really seemed like the right time. My wife actually does have a degree in Japanese cultural studies, so it's a conversation we have together kind of a lot.

 

I don't disagree with much of what Blambo says, but to expand a little bit: this is also entirely in the context of trying to read these things very closely, which can have tremendously varying returns depending on the media being approached regardless of the source. There are many gradations in between "Haha pantyshot" and Japanese Media Studies PhD, and the appropriate threshold for any particular work and audience is going to be somewhere in between.

 

Really, I think that a lot of it is just a "show your work" aspect: if you want to have a conversation about the meaning of a piece, the more context and justification you can give your analysis the better it will be received by others. Which isn't to say that other interpretations aren't valid for you, just that they may be more difficult to communicate.

 

So, it's exploring the axis of "analysis", which is almost entirely orthogonal to "enjoyment". If you enjoy I Dream of Red Chamber for the beauty of the prose, or the emotions it stirs in you, or an appreciation for the elegant construction of the narrative, or whatever else, that's great. If you enjoyed it for it's contemporary political commentary without understanding the contemporary political commentary, things would start to get shakier.

 

On a personal level, I DO think there can be something inappropriate about ignoring the fact that other cultures have distinct cultural contexts which inform how those pieces were created (in general - I'm not saying anybody here is doing that). But there's also value in cross-cultural media studies. Also, on a personal level, I feel it's totally okay for elements of something to be self-contradictory: for example, the answer to "is Kill La Kill exploitative or empowering?" can be "Yes."

 

 

Also, I want to talk to you about how think FLCL is coherent. The last time I watched it, I concluded that it's a sort of tone-poem about the way childhood feels, but didn't really have a point.

 

Speaking of FLCL, there's a good example from FLCL (along with so many other sources) with regards to the cultural context that Blambo mentioned above: How do you feel about the sound of cicadas?

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