Western Otaku usually still have a limited perspective on Anime

Last October, when the Pluto Anime went up on Netflix was the first time I ever watched any Anime of the Atom or Astro Boy franchise. I liked it a lot.  But it’s interesting to think about.

I’ve been considering myself enough into Anime to call myself an Otaku since late 2016.  This followed an increasing interest in Anime that went back to at least 2014.  But I’ve kind of had some limited interest in Anime most of my life since I first caught DiC dubbed episodes of Sailor Moon on Sunday mornings in 1996.  Yet it wasn’t till late 2023 I finally watched something featuring the character who arguably started it all.

Imagine being into American Animation and Comics for 7 to 27 years without watching or reading anything with Superman in it?  But that is the equivalent.  Yet I don’t think that’s at all unique to me for a Western Otaku.  We all know of the importance of Astro Boy but are frequently not too motivated to actually watch it.

And it’s the same with Mazinger Z and other Super Robot shows of the 70s, or Sally The Witch or Detective Conan.  All shows we know of and some of us sometimes actually watch but not always.  I know some people complain that not enough American Anime fans watch Lupin III or Gundam or Macross but those shows are damn near ubiquitous compared to the shows I’m talking about.

Thing is this isn’t an issue I’m even at all motivated to fix in myself.  My ability to enjoy Animation that predates my own birth on either side of the Pacific is limited.  I can respect and appreciate the groundwork they laid, but it’s nor what I’m personally into, what I mean when I say I’m into Anime is mostly specific kinds of Anime, trends and styles that started in the 80s but really took off in the 90s.  So Detective Conan I’ve gotten way into because it started in the 90s, but for most stuff pre-1985 it would be a disservice to them for me to be the one finally making Video Essays about them, I’m not qualified to explain their appeal.

There are exceptions, I’ve watched and loved The Rose of Versailles and both animated Lupin III movies from the 70s.  But the 70s Anime I want to watch the most is one still not even subbed, La Seine No Hoshi.

But it’s not just with older Anime that Western Otaku aren’t watching as much as they think.  Even with current seasonal Anime, what we even talk about is a small percentage of what’s actually airing on TV in Japan. I don't just mean the shows all of us are watching, I mean even the seasonal shows with only a small group of evangelists.  Even the people making YouTube videos predicated on claiming they’re watching literally everything aren’t actually watching most of it.

I’ve seen more Anime from 2017 than any other single year, and the Winter season I’ve possibly seen the most of within that year.  Yet when I go to the MAL page for that season and filter it to show only shows I haven’t seen even one episode of, sorted by most members, there are still 2 or three that are well known even though I didn’t watch them (Konosuba season 2 and Gintama mainly).  Yet even them combined with what I did watch are still dwarfed by the number of shows I don’t recall ever hearing anyone talk about at all.  And that’s just going off TV Anime that started that season with at least 12 episodes and at least 20 minutes per episode runtimes.  When you go down to what’s continuing from prior seasons it’s not just the two cour shows from fall 2016 and the three long runners everyone makes fun of, there’s dozens of shows that started in the 80s and 70s still airing that have never even remotely been on our radar.

It’s important to remember that even those of us who seek to present ourselves as knowing more and going deeper than most are still barely paddling out of the kiddie pool.  It’s like how the Roman Empire referred to itself as ruling the world when in fact most of the earth’s surface they’d never even visited and a good chuck they didn’t even know existed.

Re:Creators and the Crisis on Infinite Earths

 So I finally watched Crisis on Infinite Earths Part One recently now that it’s on MAX and I liked it, the unique framing they chose was pretty cool.

It of course get me thinking about the 2017 Anime Re:Creators again. One of the things I’ve been thinking about that show since I finally first watched it last year was that it has, perhaps by pure coincidence, some structural similarities to Crisis on Infinite Earth.  The scale is ultimately much smaller but the parallels you can make are neat.

Souta Mizushino plays the thematic role of Pariah to some extent.

Meteora is The Monitor and Altair the Anti-Monitor.

Mamika plays a role similar to Supergirl.

My thoughts on this really weren’t all that worthy of an entire post, but that’s fine.  I might take a break and not post anything else till sometime in May, it all depends on if inspiration strikes me.

Update: And I did not know when I wrote this that Amazon let the license to Re;Creators lapse so now it's not possible to legally watch at all.  Very frustrating.

Anime Neo-Westerns

 I have little ability to actual proper Westerns and yet something about Neo-Westerns in Anime I’m able to enjoy quite a bit.

They have the ability to recreate what can be fun and entertaining about Westerns but while also feeling sufficiently divorced from what Westerns represent Socio-Politically in American Culture.  Westerns are loved by the right and loathed by the left for multiple different reasons.  And even the “Subversive” Westerns that some Breadtubeers seem to like reflect how what I want from left wing media is often the opposite of most of them.

There are indigenous to the U.S. examples of Western Tropes being translated into Sci-Fi or Fantastical settings, but they usually bring the politics with them whether they want to or not.  I liked the recent Fallout series on Amazon Prime and The Mandalorian/Book of Boba Fett, but they aren’t the same as these Anime Westerns.

Spaghetti Westerns are the more well known example of the Western being taken on by another country.  However a lot of them still involve certain Hollywood figures like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.  And Italy is still part of the West.  

It’s not that I think these Anime westerns are “Apolitical”, they are always saying something about the internal politics of their own worlds at least.  But certain issues are so fundamentally different in Japanese politics that an Anime couldn't do them the same way an American movie would, certainly not by accident, and if they tried I'd trust their external perspective to have some value.

This is a post I was thinking about writing at several points last year then semi-forgot about.  But I was inspired to return to the subject after watching Grimm Variations which recently went up on Netflix, where episode 5 the Town Musicians of Breman took this Neo-Western approach.  I'm not familiar with the original fairy tale so can’t judge it on that grounds, but as a throwback to this niche Genre Anime it was great.

And it is a throwback, the golden age of this particular Sub-Genre of Anime was the 2000s.  

El Cazador De La Bruja was my first exposure to it which I watched for its thematic connection to Noir and Madlax, and it was great, it still holds up to this day.

Burst Angel is another very fun mid 2000s Neo-Western that I recommend everyone check out.

Gun x Sword is a show I  haven’t finished yet but I like plenty of what I’ve seen so far.

Sands of Destruction has some western vibes going on at times but I wouldn’t necessarily say this is it’s main genre.  Same with Black Cat from 2005 but in a very different way.

I haven’t seen any of Gun Frontier yet but I plan to eventually, it’s annoying that it isn’t on any of the official streaming sites. (Most of the shows I just mentioned should be on Crunchyroll, Sands is sadly one of those that was still only on Funimation when it died).

Now I know that many assume Cowboy Bebop should be one of the first shows mentioned when talking about Anime Neo-Westerns, but to me Bebop has little of the western in it, it is much more built on the Film Noir tropes.

Vampire Hunter D is a good example of an older Anime with Western influence, I like to describe it as a Sergio Leone film drenched in Goth.  The first movie is the only one I personally like, Bloodlust does some things with its Vampire lore that really grind my gears.

Are Giant Robot Anime about Giant Robots?

So a number of weeks ago I watched a YouTube Video from the channel The Bellam called Anime Cryptids that begins with the author talking about hearing people praise a given Mecha Anime, most often Evangelion, for being a Mecha Anime that “isn’t about the Robot”, and then goes on to explain how no Mecha Anime is actually about the Robot, especially not Gundam.  

And yet to me the obvious response to this annoying type of Evangelion fan should be “what do you mean Evangelion isn’t about the Robot?”  If anything Eva is more about the Robot then Gundam since in Eva the Robot is actually a character with sentience of its own, but mostly the point is key to why Eva should be compared to Super Robot shows like Mazinger Z rather than Real Robot shows.

Still I find it amusing that to both sides of the debate in that video it’s treated as a good thing for a show to not actually be about the Robot.  I feel like especially in shows that are named after the Robot that should not be the case, it should never be a good thing for a show to be named in-correctly.

Clearly we are dealing with different people prioritizing different senses of what a show is “about”.  This video’s argument for Gundam not being about the Robot is the abstract philosophical themes of the overarching metanarrative of the Gundam Franchise. On that level no piece of Genre fiction is actually about the premise of it’s Genre, but no one feels the need to defend the integrity of their favorite Batman story by explaining how it isn’t actually about the Billionaire dressing up like a Bat to fight crime.

The author of this video clearly strongly feels only someone who hasn’t actually seen Gundam would think it is actually about the Gundam, but I’m not so sure.  I explained above one reason for viewing Gundam as less about the Robot the Evangelion.  But on the other hand Gundam feels more structurally built around the Mecha battles then Eva does.

Now I have to admit I did not initially respond to this video with the strong disagreement I’m expressing here. I initially left a comment saying something like “Robotics;Notes is actually about the Robot and that’s why I like it”.  But why did I feel that way?  At the time I would not have been able to explain myself and the counterargument that it doesn’t even exist yet for most of the show could easily have been thrown in my face.

It feels more narratively about the Robot then a lot of other Mecha shows because building the Robot is explicitly the Goal of the main protagonists, as an end unto itself not merely as a tool to achieve something else.  The build up of the Evil Conspiracy they will wind up having to thwart is mostly treated as a background plot till the final stretch of episodes.  But I guess even then the creator of that YouTube video could argue the Robot is actually just a symbol of something else like Communism maybe.

So I guess the answer to the question is both Yes and No.

Mark Antony, the most Dramatic Actor of the Last Century BC

The Shakespeare Play that is named after Julius Caesar is primarily about Brutus and Cassius, yet in all its Hollywood movie adaptations top billing always seems to go to whoever plays Mark Antony.  He is also much more conventionally the main character of another Shakespeare Play.

And back in the Golden Age of Hollywood Historical Epics the biggest movies set during this century tended to be movies about Cleopatra where inevitably Mark Anthony becomes the male lead.

Something about Mark Antony, or the popular perception of the kind of person he was, makes him the character of this era Actors of a certain caliber most want to perform.  A compelling combination of Honor and Hedonism, Impulsiveness and Cunningness, Rage and Romance.

As someone who’s often very cynical about the more gritty and “realistic” approach usually taken by more modern fictionalizations of the Ancient World, Antony is a character I particularly fear would lose his appeal.  I can admit how a character like Caesar could benefit from a more three dimensional modern writer.  Antony however is character I tend to cynically presume will just be turned into a caricature.

Not to mention my more complex feelings on how the art of acting has changed. I don’t consider any actors you commonly see in contemporary Movies and TV to be bad, but the style of acting I enjoy the most has gone out of fashion in Hollywood.  I can’t picture any MCU actor competing with Marlon Brando, Carleton Heston and Richard Burton.  In contemporary acting I'm most a fan of the Voice Acting you hear in English Dubs of Anime. John Michael Tatun, Crispan Freeman and Dan Green are each actors I’d love to hear play Mark Anthony.

So imagine my surprise when during this last week I almost 20 years late to the party finally watched HBO’s Rome TV series and James Purefoy completely blew me away.  Now I have to admit he kinda seemed like what I was cynically expecting early on, but by the end of episode 6 I was suddenly sold, but it’s in season 2 that he really gets to shine.  He’s distinct from the classic takes I referred to above, yet still inline with them in a way I didn’t expect from something so modern.

Now this shows takes historical liberties already in season 1 but they become more significant in season 2.  But I don’t care about that when I’m being entertained by what I’m watching.  And this show was entertaining all around.  I’ve seen complaints about how Cleopatra is depicted but I found it refreshing, not how I’d write her but refreshing nonetheless.

But I made this post to talk about Mark Antony's fictionalizations.  I titled it “Dramatic Actor” rather than “leading Actor” because he’s never been the sole title character, he’s Cleopatra’s Lover and Caesar’s Avenger, and an Antagonist in the more rare works that portray this history with Octavian as the protagonist.

And all this meaty dramatic material comes from still drawing on only select portions of his life and career.  As a Christian who likes to look at at least all BC History as revolving around Jerusalem it’s notable that he had been in Judaea at least twice, as a young man under Gabinius in the 50s and then in 37 BC during the Triumvirate when he defeats the Parthians and Mattathias Antigonus.  Maybe there have been Israeli movies depicting at least the latter of those, I wouldn’t at this time know.

HBO Rome covers some stuff not usually covered but missed plenty of other opportunities like the above.  I’d really like to actually see Fulvia onscreen for a change, she sounds like a compelling potential Anime Girl.

I have been a pretty vocal critic of the Great Man Theory of History. I can imagine some who miss the point of that debate would find it weird for me to then make a long ramble about one of those titular great men.  The dispute between Great Man Theories and Materialists is about what drives History.  And the story of someone viewed as a Great Man of History even though he ultimately lost in the end is a great opportunity to demonstrate how Material Conditions can doom anymore no matter how capable or “Heroic” they are.

It’s possible the real Marcus Antonius had little in common personality wise with the idea of Mark Antony I’ve been talking about.  Those who criticize the adage “History is written by the winners” are often taking it too literally, the point is to pay attention to the biases of who’s writing.  If it was 100% literally true all the time we’d still popularly view Antony and Cleopatra based on the utterly demonized portrait Octavian's propagandists tried to paint.  However the positive depictions however indirectly eventually go back through that propaganda.

However in my view Historical Fiction needs to be viewed the same as other adaptations, the desire of some people to moralize about getting history wrong in fiction I find annoying.  People shouldn't be using fiction to learn history in the first place.  Mark Antony the character I like watching so much should on some level be viewed as a legend inspired by History just like King Arthur.

Serial Experiments Lain is a show I like Weirdly

Honestly I really struggled to decide what to name this post and still don't think I made the right choice.

Serial Experiments Lain is an  Anime I like a lot but for seemingly very different reasons than most people.  Or at least not the things people usually talk about in their Video Essays.  

All the talk about it as Prophetic about the nature of the Internet is the product of Zoomers and Younger Millennials who don’t remember how quickly the Internet caught on.  The theories about it being related to the Collective Unconscious concept are possibly valid but not my main reading.  And nothing is more disappointing than watching a video that just explains what happened in the plot.

It is a part of my Reverse Gnosticism in Anime thesis, that is the closest I come to thinking about the show Philosophically. 

Its fascinating simply how for a show so incredibly popular NOT influential it’s been Aesthetically speaking, to my knowledge not many other shows look and sound like Lain even in exactly the time period when all the Lain knockoffs you’d have expected the industry to greenlight in the wake of its success would have aired.  The only one I can think of is Boogiepop Phantom from 2000, so yeah I recommend that to Lain fans who don’t already know about it.

It’s also very fascinating in how it tells its story.  I can’t think of any other show where we spend most of our screen time with one specific character and yet that character remains an enigma.  This a moment very early in the pilot, before she even becomes aware of the plot’s inciting incident where how she acts still confuses me.  In Anime especially it’s very rare for me to question if the main character might actually be the villain, but in Lain I do even on a rewatch where I know what’s going to happen.

In the episode focused on her sister, the first time I watched it I thought the only ambiguity was if she did that to her sister on purpose or by accident, that she wasn’t responsible at all never even occurred to me. It also wasn’t till the third time I watched the show I figured out when it happened.

But another thing about Lain is that I like the show a lot even though I also lament the non-existence of what I thought the show was before I watched it.

TrixieTheGoldenWitch on her old YouTube Channel currently named YGG Studio has an old video titled Aesthetic Is Narrative, a segment of the video is about what a certain Lain related image means to her, in which she describes Lain as a girl who’s become a Goddess of the Internet even though she’s lonely offline.  Now that is not exactly an inaccurate description, but the first place it led my brain too was a show that would not necessarily have any SciFi or Supernatural elements.  A Girl accidentally or intentionally building a cult of personality around herself on the early Internet, in ways that would fundamentally not work the same today.

Study of Swords MIGHT be wrong about Deconstruction

 A YouTube channel named Study of Swords has a video titled You Are Wrong About Deconstruction, and I have very uniquely mixed feelings about this video.  Sometimes I feel like I agree with it entirely and sometimes I feel like it’s led astray by a myopic perspective on the subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiXzVaqdIgo&pp=ygUieW91IGFyZSB3cm9uZyBhYm91dCBkZWNvbnN0cnVjdGlvbg%3D%3D

The gist of the video’s thesis is that the modern Internet Culture understanding of Genre Deconstruction is entirely the invention of TVTropes and that it’s both to unrelated Derridean Deconstruction and not something that any work of fiction has ever truly done, certainly not intentionally.  And if one did it would be inherently bad.

Here’s the thing, all the specific examples of alleged Deconstruction they are annoyed by are Anime examples.  And their defense of that is that they are an Anime centric channel and that’s the discourse they are in dialogue with.  However the video isn’t titled “You are wrong about Deconstruction in Anime” or “Otaku are wrong about Deconstruction” and TVTropes didn’t build their concept of Deconstruction on primarily Anime examples, they built it on Watchmen and Game of Thrones (the books before it was a TV show) and Scream and Shrek.

In 2003 The History Channel aired a documentary called Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked. I'd recorded it on VHS when it aired so I had watched the entire thing multiple times back then.  However I had gone years without rewatching by the time I first discovered TV tropes and still didn’t rewatch it again till after I’d watched this YouTube video.  It speaks to the unreliability of memory that I had basically incepted myself into thinking they actually used the word Deconstruction or Deconstruct in the segment on Watchmen, in fact they did not.  However the basic idea of what TVTropes means by Genre Deconstruction was there.

The quote they put at the start of their video is telling “Deconstruction is when a thing I like is a Genre I disrespect”.  Because within the Anime Community that definitely feels like it’s often the subtext, the community is filled with Anti-Otaku like Noralities who can’t admit to liking an Isekai without going on about how it’s not like all the other Isekai.  And while this sentiment doesn’t get expressed much recently, there definitely were some early Madoka fans who were open about liking it and not the old Shoujo Magical Girl shows.

Thing is that’s not really the case when it comes Deconstruction outside of Anime.  No one who calls Watchmen a Deconstruction while explaining why they like it hates the rest of the genre, rather everyone understands you need to love the genre in its standard forms to appreciate the Deconstruction.  Same with the relationship between GoT and Fantasy, or Scream and Slasher films.  Despite it’s technically etymological relation to the word Destroy it’s not actually meant to be malicious, it’s about taking it apart to assemble something new, like a Lego set.

Because I was a Nomrie nerd for over a decade before Anime became my main interest, my perception of terms like Deconstruction isn’t as inherently filtered through Anime discourse.

Even among people using the word to describe an Anime they like I don’t think the intent is universally malicious.  I currently oppose labeling Madoka a Deconstruction, but early on I was different, I did defend calling it a deconstruction in the past, but it never went with some hostility towards other Magical Girl shows, rather I got into Madoka soon after I became mature enough to finally be willing to publicly admit I like Sailor moon and always have.

This of course isn’t the only AniTube video that is in part about denying certain Popular Anime qualify as a Deconstruction, others do know to make the comparison to Watchmen, in so doing show their ignorance of the place Watchmen actually holds in the history of its Genre.  Like when TrixieTheGoldenWitch did a video on the subject arguing certain things aren’t Deconstructions because they didn’t do anything that hadn’t been done before, unlike Watchmen.  Watchmen didn’t do anything that hadn’t been done before, all through the 70s there were already Superhero Comics that were Dark and dealing with real world social issues and politics, there were already Antiheroes and Heroes turning into Villains and Villains turning into Heroes, already stories with moral complexity.  Watchmen didn't do a single thing that was completely new, it was all in the complete picture it painted.  Madoka however did things that had rarely if ever been done before and that’s why it’s not a Deconstruction, none of what’s Dark about feels like a commentary on prior stories because all of it is tied to what’s mechanically distinct about it.

But maybe this misunderstanding of how inherently critical a Deconstruction is supposed to be has seeped outside the Anime Community.  Consider all the Breadtubers who think it’s important to “Deconstruct” what’s Problematic about the Superhero and Fantasy genres. Consider the YouTuber Worm’s Hole who seems to think the Darker version of a Genre is always better because they expose what’s dark and ugly about the real world.

In discussions of both Watchmen and Game of Thrones I commonly see the phrase “Critique of Power” used to describe what both Alan Moore and George R. R. Martin are trying to do and that’s why no it isn’t Feminist to root for the Dragon Lady Girl Boss.  I don’t entirely agree with either side of the Daenerys debate, but I am not the kind of Leftist who puts too much emphasis on critiquing Power as a concept that needs to rethink their priorities.  I’m neither a Tankie or an Anarchist, if I’m a Marxist at all I’m somewhere between Kautsky and Luxemburg.

We do not in the 21st Century need to worry about arguing against Feudal Style Monarchy anymore.  If anything the knee jerk reaction of many Liberals and even some Socialists to anything that even looks like Monarchy is a problem, whether Cuba or Vietnam qualify as a “Dictatorship” or not is irrelevant to if they are successful Communist experiment.  The Greek word Tyrant was not originally inherently derogatory, it was made derogatory by the same Laocophile to whom the word Democracy was Derogatory.

So the title “You are wrong about Deconstruction” is probably increasingly correct when directed at a good number of people.  But the video’s understanding of why is flawed.