Chasing Away Readers With Brambles Friday, Jul 27 2007 

amusement and anime and anno and devilman and games and geass and getter robo and go nagai and gurren lagann and manga and mao dante and mazinger and mecha and nostalgia and observation and opinion and religion and super robot wars and technology and tomino and violence jack reuche 3:32 am

Of all the crazy things I’ve said and the conventional tags I’ve used I’m getting hits from people searching for mecha, Nagai Go’s latest anime, and Hiroshige Aya. In other words, the otaku are out there and they’re watching. So it is time for “servisu”.

To speak of mecha as a genre I feel like it’s at a strange place now as its romantic quality has diminished greatly between a combination of oversaturation and technological advancement. Though a giant humanoid weapon of destruction which would be piloted by a person is not physically or even logistically totally impossible to be realized it is actually pretty damn pointless. And if you think about it would be exceptionally terrible. And you know people do think about and realize things like that and that there is little difference between stories which do and don’t have mecha since they all come down to people in the end anyway. I think that’s part of the reason that comparatively “super robot” anime with ridiculous mecha, occurances, and animation featuring inhuman antagonists has experienced a recent resurgence compared to the real robot series which in particular seemed to dominate the 90s and had a large share of the 80s trying to emulate Gundam’s success.

To end with mecha, if I’m not mistaken the two most popular mecha series within the past full year so far (one can expect the upcoming gundam series to have “name brand recognition popularity” to a certain extent) have been Code Geass and Gurren Lagann. The former could very easily have stood without mecha at all and has a very minimalist focus on them when all is said and done. In fact the big gimmick of the series involves the main character being able to give anyone who looks into his eye an absolute order once so if anything the presence of the mecha in fact gets in the way of that. As to Gurren Lagann…. I believe I already mentioned that the series is ultimately just a composite of a myriad of concepts, elements, themes, and even scenes (I seem to recall the titular mecha using the “super inazuma kick” from gunbuster in the 7th or 9th episode) from other influential works featuring frenetic action animation. What it’s trying to do does work particularly well with mecha and I enjoy it but it’s utter lack of originality speaks to the stagnation of the mecha genre.

So to get to Go Nagai (Go is his first name)  as far as I know the most recent anime that he has any relation to is Kotetsushin Jeeg 鋼鉄神ジーグ which I have not and likely will never see (I didn’t see the original either though through a twist of fate I have read his manga version) and don’t have very high expectations for. I really do wonder what the last animated work that he had any notable level of involvement with was. I suspect it was the “Demon Prince Enma” OVA 鬼公子炎魔 which is supposedly a remake of an old series of his which I thought was somewhat of a juvenile comedy. Well this remake at least appears rather mature. As it happens that’s the most recent work of his to be released in english/the united states as far as I can tell. Personally the last two things of his I saw in their entirety that I can recall were Re: Cutie Honey which wasn’t bad and Maou Dante which I thought was kind of good when I saw it though I was in a particularly anti-christian mood at that time. Recently (after I wrote that I’d dreamt of Getter Robo if I remember correctly) I’ve had the opportunity to read some of his old manga and frankly it’s a mixed bag. I think his themes are good the issue is his presentation (the exaggerated violence and grotesque and perverse contents). He also stands out as having been around for so long now that you can view an increase in his art quality and then a decrease in its quality. He has a lot of collaborative and authoring credits for works, mostly adaptations and alternative versions of his own works (there were at least 2 versions of many of his mecha series, Mazinger and Getter in particular), which makes it unclear to me how much of a hand he truly had in them.

Whether it’s Devilman or Mazinger that’s really his flagship is difficult to say but his works do seem to generally follow a certain pattern in which the biggest variance is whether  mecha is present or not and there’s some sort of supernatural or inhuman presence.  That said it seems to me like his main recurring theme is “transhumanism” whether it be the fusing of man and beast or demon or what have you or man and machine (many of his works feature cyborgs in some capacity) .  Through reading his works the one that leaves the strongest impression on me is Violence Jack, the release of which spanned his career. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the inclusion (and often death….) of alternative versions of characters of his from other works. The most bizarre of which that I saw (I pretty much have only read this part, the beginning, and the ending of Violence Jack) was his alternative telling of Mazinger Z. In VJ Kouji is a younger teen whose grandfather founded a renowned style of karate, Doctor Hell was his grandfather’s star disciple along with his father, and Mazinger Z (which is a 20 some meter tall robot in the original work) is a 2 or so meter tall black man who was his father’s greatest pupil. In what can only be called a disturbing social statement “Jim Mazinger” is blinded in a coup by Doctor Hell to take over the karate school and young Kouji rides on his shoulders giving him advice as to the location of foes.

Let’s recap that: a short pubescent japanese boy rides around a tall adult black man and gives him commands in order to fight off his enemies. I absolutely can not tell whether ‘Jim Mazinger” is a black man just because Mazinger Z was black in the first place or if this is some sort of social statement. Amusingly Aphrodite A and Venus A (or was it Diana?) are portrayed as amazons in the same arc. So all that said, probably the main issue with Nagai’s work is how it can tend to be really bizarre to the point of being incomprehensible. Does a particular scene mean something more than it appears to, does it not, I have not devoted great amounts of time to figuring that out though I imagine one could easily write a thesis analyzing his work (what institution would accept it in pursuit of what kind of degree?). In any case Violence Jack might be his “magnum opus” or it might just be extremely violent post-apocalyptic (actually a lot of his stuff at least descended into dystopia in the first place) reimaginings of some of his various (less popular?) works. Now that I think about it the violence even in that work really doesn’t compare to a lot of stuff out there these days. One can make a case that he was a pioneer in that area in japan though whether that is good or bad…

Finally as to Aya Hiroshige, will she ever release a full album or will she be swallowed up and disappear from pop culture without leaving a lasting and notable impression? I mean her two singles were both game related, the first was from an iffy anime adaptation of a now classic game series that has gone into remission (Sonic X) and the second was the title song to a game itself (Generation of Chaos 4). The latter is from over 2 years ago now. I think she’s going to school but even so, no album, no new projects? She does have her own blog which I never read that might have some insights but seeing as her website is corporate I doubt it. http://hiroshige-aya.net/index.php

Recently I had to take a break from games and Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 in particular due to hand problems. This has actually interfered with my writing as well much to my dismay. My condition seems pretty good all of a sudden that in spite of some pain I’ve been able to write so much today. Perhaps rather than playing around and writing to amuse myself I should have done some work. Well everyone needs a break.

Oh wait I forgot to say about mecha that for all that people continue to claim that Evangelion has colored mecha anime (most say “ruin”) that’s come after it I feel that this is just an extension of the influence that the creator of Gundam and more to the point Ideon (which Evangelion draws closer parallels to than many other works), Yoshiyuki Tomino, had on anime in general. But it is late/early so I don’t want to elaborate on that and likely never will. OK I will say that the parallels are influential and not coincidental. But for all that (Hideaki) Anno creates works that are easier to become obsessed with (Yoshiyuki) Tomino creates works which I find more enjoyable… But he’s really dumped some stinkers out there. This is not dissimilar to some matters in the japanese gaming industry but that I will not at all get into so as usual use your imagination.

 

Reuche rides a horse into the sea Friday, Jul 27 2007 

china and comedy and cracked and economy and irresponsible statements and money is good and observation and opinion and philosophy and politics and rants and religion and reporting and soviet union and technology reuche 1:01 am

It is not your imagination, people really have gotten dumber. Probably every faceless person who writes on wikipedia has an opinion about this and the most interesting one I saw was one blaming vaccination which really made me wonder. Personally I blame “prosperity” but one could just as well blame human nature (if you don’t feel compelled to do something for any reason you won’t). But on the other hand barring extreme situations like nuclear holocaust, exhaustion of crucial natural resources before they can be suitably replaced or recycled (an outside chance to occur even in my lifetime if I hold out long enough), alien invasion, chains of “natural” disasters, mutations, bizarre unforeseen programming problems (like what could have happened in the year 2000 had nobody realized it ahead of time), and all kinds of other crap, then with a few more advances the idiot threshold should be surpassed. That is, eventually everyone can be stupid and immobile and it won’t make a difference. Actually I can’t quite foresee that point being reached in my lifetime though perhaps a lack of necessity for physical activity. If you think about it people in western society already spend more time lazing about and/or entertaining themselves than they do supporting or improving themselves.

Boy that was a lousy paragraph. Sad to say the next one won’t be much better as my hands are in excruciating pain.

I have decided to share some information that might be useful. If you want to figure things out then follow the money (it helps to do this if you have some yourself). I just spent the last few hours reading about commodities trends in general and the situation of the oil market in particular and that information speaks more volumes about the state of the world and where it’s headed than just about anything else. As a result of this something that I’m only now understanding is that whatever religious and political issues and motivations may surface and threaten the balance of the world in general there is very little chance that money will ever be overthrown. What that means is that you can be concerned about fundamentalists all you want but so long as the rich want to get richer they’ll end out buried in a corner somewhere. More so than any statement or ideal on the strivings and values for freedom being what collapsed the soviet union the simple truth is that it was money. One can envision a similar outcome for china eventually but that’s another story.

The thing I’m thinking about right now in particular is that for all the threat that religious extremists pose to the world right now their existence can only diminish in the face of what the worlds economy has to offer. If only for the simple reasons that 16 year old boys would much rather be masturbating to pornography than at the extreme strapping bombs to their chest and at the benign listening to smelly old men prattle on for hours on end in cramped rooms without air conditioning. And so did the world become secular as technology rose fueled by money. This will take a certain amount of time of course, even now the catholic church still has some prominence after all so…. I actually think that if the economic powers of the world pooled their resources they could wage a much more effective cultural battle than a traditional one, perhaps even for less money, as the united states’ recent actions have shown the old path only created new problems.

Alas that I only thought I had posted here recently about morality and laws which included certain choice catch-phrases like “no need for dragons when you have bombs” but I realize now that it is just a draft. So since I might never publish that and I didn’t say this there anyway: “religion was defeated by electricity a long time ago, it is just such a behemoth that its collapse continues even now, and when firmly laid out the decomposition could potentially take even longer”. That’s a pretty good line. I could have just said that and it would have been a hell of a lot snappier. Oh well.