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your thoughts have summoned this post from hell so, as i pray... Home > Archives > 2006 > July > 27 Yaoi, Het, Fanservice, and the Nature of Anime – why not to care (or bother blogging) about shit like thatIt came of me watching Strawberry Panic’s second opening one too many times. It came of me liking Kannazuki no Miko a bit too much. It came of my conversation with MrPippers and Joker. It came of the comments on that post on the Anime Stock Exchange. Ultimately, though, it came of me being way too tired and thinking way too much about topics that don’t deserve much attention (read: anime.) There is no romance anime. At least not according to the “sentimental, idealized love” entry in the dictionary I just consulted. There might be romance of the “exciting love affair” type. No, there is. But that’s not the point. I think most of us understand what I mean when I say the word romantic, so you should all understand what I mean when I say that there is no romantic anime. Love, romance, meaningful feelings, in anime? We shall see. First off let’s examine some of the comments on the aforementioned Anime Stock Exchange post, shall we?
I think that the last sentence is especially worth scrutinizing. Yuri and yaoi are both, as established here, fantasies, nothing more and nothing less. In other words, they exist to serve the imaginations and needs of consumers. They are fanservice. As stated before several a time by me, “anime is to fanservice as chips are to salsa. It’s a delivery mechanism.” As confirmed by MrPippers, and, of course, as realized by countless others, that’s what anime IS, in essence (using a mathematical thingamajig called substitution)- fanservice. No, it’s not all ecchi. I’m not saying that. I’m using a broader sense of the word. The ANN definition, except taking that definition literally. Something inserted to please the fans. If a series is built to compliment an existing game or manga or movie or book or figurine or what have you, its existence is service for the fans of that pre-existing media. If it’s new and stands alone, it will, without fail, attempt to appeal to potential fans by servicing them. Anime is fanservice. It’s indisputable. But with this established, isn’t it pointless to argue that yaoi and yuri are fanservice? In anime, at least, they would automatically be fanservice by nature of being a part of the anime. No, I’m not trying to say “oh hey, yaoi is fanservice. hurrrrr~!”, I’m actually thinking a bit deeper than this. I’m thinking about heterosexual relationships in anime right now, and what they mean. Strawberry Panic’s opening, rife with its colorful portraits of love and passion, clashes horribly with the show’s shallow premise and crappy execution. The opening practically laughs at itself, saying “look how amazingly deceitful we can get!! have fun with your maria-sama ga miteru rip off when you’re done appreciating our lyrics~!” But, as established previously, the show takes itself seriously. It sucks because it’s shit, not because the creators attempted and failed parody, as is the case with Bleach. And, taking this into account, we see that the opening of Strawberry Panic’s intent is to get the viewer into the show. “Care about our characters,” the opening proclaims in a whiny, 8-year old voice. “Feel the love they feel. Shed the tears they shed. Understand that this isn’t meant to be the funniest show ever. It’s got its humor, yes, but it’s supposed to be drama. Come on, appreciate the drama. Bad yuri shows have feelings too, you know.” The fact that this disgustingly “make-you-care” opening accompanies this disgustingly “go-ahead-laugh” show MUST say something about that whole yuri fantasy thing in anime. That drama, that emotion, that feelings and seriousness- that these are all false. Moving right along, we take another show that’s over-dramaticized… say, Kannazuki no Miko! At the end of the day, it’s just a fantasy, right? We just watch it to see the girls kissing eachother and the mechas blowing eachother up, right? No real feelings went into the show. It’s not like there’s anything there. There can’t be. They say hindsight is 100/20 or someshit, and, as Strawberry Panic is airing after Kannazuki no Miko, arent’ the lessons we learn from it an important factor in considering Kannazuki no Miko’s quality? The answer, my readers, is a resounding “yes.” But for one moment, consider Kannazuki no Miko as it is, with no Strawberry Panic on the radar. It’s full of emotion- the voice acting, the animation and “camera work”, the art, the soundtrack, the execution. It has a good storyline, and, while mecha-ridden, is home to several powerful characters with their own unique emotions (aside from Souma and Chikane, who both just want to sex up Himeko). It’s a beauty of an anime and stands as the shoujo-ai.com proclaimed FLAGSHIP OF YURI, portraying the most realistic and meaningful emotions in any lesbian anime ever. Such facts, such praise, surely they only point towards one conclusion- Kannazuki no Miko has meaningful love in it. Yet along comes Strawberry Panic and trivializes all these things. And we look at Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito. We look at Kasimasi ~Girl Meets Girl~. We look at Maria-sama ga Miteru. Are there really any feelings there? Is there anything beyond the fun fun quazi-memes of “yuri flute rape” and various jokes about Fukuzawa Yumi’s brother’s school? There can’t be. But- wait! These shows have more than just GIRLS in them! In fact, one of the three main characters of Kannazuki no Miko was a YOUNG MAN. And he was STRAIGHT, as evidenced by his desire to bone Himeko. There was quite a lot of storyline regarding his love for Himeko. His feelings were just as potent and meaningful as Chikane’s. That is to say, in a Strawberry Panic view of the world, meaningless. Yes, boys and girls, there’s a heterosexual relationship in anime that has no meaning. Wait! Let’s examine this further. Wait. No, we don’t have to. Any time that we are confronted with a heterosexual relationship, we can just look at the anime, see the things we recognize as specific fanservice, and laugh off the show. Saishuu Heiki Kanojo. What the hell was up with the death fetishism? LOLFANSERVICE. Wolf’s Rain. Hahaha emo. LOLFANSERVICE. (Insert eroge conversion here). Sex. LOLFANSERVICE. Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu. Tsunderekko, mahoutsukai uchujin, mikuru (insert witty comment about jason here), and animation whoring. LOLFANSERVICE. Can anyone tell me with a straight face that, when Kyon told Haruhi that “omg ponytails turn me on let’s sexing”, they felt a wave of emotion? Apparently this scene brought tears to the eyes of one of the people at Tsunami Channel. Apparently, among some, this is seen as the epitome of love in anime. Get over yourselves already, fanboys. It’s fanservice. It’s a crappily written scene in an excessively over-done anime that takes itself seriously whilst giving whatever it can to the fans. Love doesn’t exist in anime. You’re looking for something to relate to? Something to find feeling or emotion in? A touching love story? Read a book. Find the journal or letters of some real human, and read them. Find out what a real person was thinking and feeling. Anime? ANIME?! Feelings? Anime? Feelings? Love? Romance? Get out. It’s 2:16 AM my time as I type these very words. I just insulted several of my favorite shows mercilessly. Also, I’ve done more than enough to earn the spite of Yuricon or shoujo-ai.com or any number of SOS-dan fans. What I’ve written here isn’t just a spur-of-the-moment thing. Some of you, a while back, were wondering what I meant when I said I hated anime. Some of you consider me unintelligent for watching all the shitty anime I do. Most of you probably misjudged my relationship with Japanese animation. I’m not trying to tell people not to like what they like. At the end of the day, as stated in the quote near the beginning of this post, it’s just a fantasy. People get off on a variety of things, people like a variety of things, people might as well entertain themselves in a variety of ways. Making oneself emo with Evangelion isn’t something I look down on. I’m not trying to say “hey you suck for liking to do what you do.” Hell, I do a lot of shit that infringes upon any set of rational guidelines that might be set up based on this post. But remember this, before engaging in any attempted debates regarding the nature of fanservice in anime or the “true yaoi”- yaoi is the same as heterosexuality in anime, they’re both 100% fanservice. |
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Tsubaki said:
I was going to talk about how much I love the new OP sequence on my blog.. guess I better not. Lol.
Galen Musbach said:
Romantic anime?
Pretty Cure
Princess Tutu
King of Bandits Jing
Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi
Kamichu!
I’m Gonna be an Angel
CyberTeam in Akihabara
Crest of the Stars
Moon Phase
Risky Safety
Porco Rosso
The Cat Returns
-Galen
Galen Musbach said:
Argh! I forgot _Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar_! Very romantic.
-Galen
lolikitsune said:
Tsubaki – there’s nothing wrong with the OP as such. And seriously, you don’t need to act according to my whims. I’ve been blogging for five months; I’m no one special.
Galen – the fact that you replied in that manner amuses me to no end. Good job making me chuckle to myself.
Hung said:
This post needs pictures of the aforementioned fanservice…
lolikitsune said:
Fuck pictures.
Hung said:
I want to live?
Galen Musbach said:
Bizarre as it may seem, I’m serious; romance isn’t about sex.
The theme of PreCure is that Love Will Save The World. In the follow on series Max Heart, our central couple has to deal with raising a child while continuing the fight against darkness. Princess Tutu may be romantic tragedy, but that’s still a romance. Jing is motivated by his love for his mother, and the Jing-Girl of the week always ends up falling for him. ‘Abenobashi occurs in the aftermath of romantic tragedy, as Sasshi struggles to avoid the same mistakes. Kamichu is certainly a romance; Yurie first agrees to use divine power because she hopes it will impress the guy she’s crushing on. The center of Tennimon is Family, but romance plays a significant role in several relationships as well. Cyberteam is about the destructive side of love, but that’s still a romantic ideal — it’s just a negative ideal. Crest of the Stars is centered in the love between Jinto and Lafiel. Moon Phase is about the romance between a man and a much younger woman. Each of the story arcs in Risky Safety is about love under conflict. Porco Rosso has a tragic hero whose rejection of love reflects a romantic ideal. And the message of The Cat Returns is that you must love yourself before you can love others. In TSF Sugar, we have a story of redemption through love. There’s lots of romance in anime, but you won’t find it looking at T&A.
-Galen
lolikitsune said:
Excuse me but who in the world said it was about sex? There’s a shitload of sex in anime. If it were a matter of that I wouldn’t have written this article. I’m talking about romantic ideal, not sex.
You’ve missed the entire point of my article, it would seem.
I doubt telling you to reread it will solve anything, as either you’ll be offended or confused, and I definitely am not going to rewrite it in this comment so that you can understand it. Let’s leave things at you amusing me by presenting a list of anime that -I take it this was your intent- disprove my point. Amused lolikit is more fun than condescending lolikit.
Galen Musbach said:
You write, so far as I can tell, about there being no romance in yuri, yaoi, or heterosexual relationships in anime; I agree with that. My examples feature “sentimental, idealized love” in relationships that don’t have a sexual dimension -at all-.
-Galen
lolikitsune said:
I covered, albeit briefly, Maria-sama ga Miteru. The “romance” in that is no more or less sexual than that in Moon Phase. No, my greater statement is that there are no meaningful feelings or emotions in anime. My post effectively rips on anime as a whole for being a shallow medium that deludes people into thinking that they’re feeling something by presenting them with various types of fanservice. This applies to your examples as well.
Moon Phase, for one, much more than any of the anime I discussed in my post, fits my argument. It’s not just a chip for the fanservice salsa, it’s a freakin’ tankard that you drink the stuff out of. With that opening, the gothlolitsunderenekomimilolicon nature of Hazuki, the vampire stuff… the show is 100% fanservice, and, were it not mathematically impossible, the manga it’s based on would be even more fanservice than that. The show is not based in a desire to get feelings across. It’s not relating some person’s romantic ideals. It’s attempting to appeal to those of others. It’s dishing out hollow emotions as a method of raking in supporters, consumers. That’s what anime does.
Perhaps what I was saying is more clear now?
Of course, it won’t seem clear at all if you’re in disagreement with me. Which is cool too. You can also choose to disbelieve that I’m being serious, as, if you take a look around this blog, you’ll see I’m rarely serious.
Galen Musbach said:
Ah. Faithless commercialism. Yes, I’ve noticed that.
May I suggest _Miracle Shoujo Limit-chan_? (1973). Not romantic in any degree, the subject of the anime is a young girl learning to overcome feelings of alienation. _Majokko Chikuru_ (1978) explores the meaning of family in many directions. And _Goldfish Warning_ has rather a lot to say about the meaning of friendship.
The Meaning of Love? Actually, I still go with Cyberteam in Akihabara. That anime portrays romantic love as a corrupting, destructive force, but that’s still a meaningful portrayal of love.
-Galen
lolikitsune said:
Good to see we’ve reached some kind of understanding, and I’d gladly check out everything you were recommending were it not for the fact that I’m currently trying to cut back on anime consumption. I’ll look into them once I get below 20 current shows ;)
Anonymous said:
What is love
Baby don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me
No more
bettynoire said:
It intrigues me that you argue that anime has no true love in it, and then tell us to read a book, or letters from real people. What makes the lovei n those letters or that book more real than the commercialized love of anime? What makes a letter from a soldier to his sweetheart back home (or say, a fictional story about the same) more meaningful than an anime with the same premise? Does commercialization rape the product of the emotion behind it? Shakespeare wrote tons of plays hailed as classics of romantic literature — the tale of Romeo and Juliet has inspired impassioned arguments on the topic of love. That same tale was basically a rip off of some other story, that was a rip off ofsome myth, that was probably a rip off of someone’s actual life with a few details split here and there.
I’m babbling.
My point is this. Love is what you put into it. Love is temporary. Love is a word that is a mere symbol for something that is experienced differently by everyone. Some people like flowers, some people like walking uder the same umbrella, some people like kissing, some people like to make a special dinner. All of these express the same thing to different people… love. Love, in real life, is fanservice. What sells life?
My point is this — more clearly, this time. Everything needs a selling point, whether it’s being “bought” literally or figuratively. When something you buy figuratively (like life), that selling point is often love, in varying forms. Why then, say that the love we see in anime is fanservice, when it is no more shallow than the love we toss about in everyday life?
Love is what you put into it. If you see beyond the paints and outlines, and think about how a person could justify those actions to themselves, then a anime characters motivations are of the same value as those behind a character in a book, or a letter’s narrator.
Unless they’re Ikari Shinji. In which case, they’re just fucking annoying.
sidenote: You are quite possibly the most fascinating anime blogger I’ve read thus far.
lolikitsune said:
A-ha! Someone responds to the post intelligently!
This must be the happiest moment of my anime blogging. You see, you just saved me the trouble of writing an existentialist post explaining why life itself is shallow and meaningless and that there’s only one purpose to the existence of our biologic machines- to reproduce. Anything else is exactly what we make of it in our individual minds, and therefore not fact. “Love” is unnecessary for the animals known as humans to live, much like “anime.”
Of course, it’s stupid to write a post about all that, because even if it can be construed as something other than hypocritical, it serves no true point. Also, I’m of the opinion that people come here to read about anime, not existentialist angst, and, as such, I am glad that I don’t need to write the follow-up to this post.
When I discussed this post with other people, in IRC, on AIM, etc., in the end, no one could disagree with me. But there was still the flaw in my point that once I say the things I have, much much more needs to be said.
And you, my friend, have said it.
extraclassiclite said:
Reproduction isn’t our purpose, it’s just something that we were optimized for to a certain extent. Purpose has to come from a mind. “Lumps of clay are formed into shapes, but spoons are made in the minds of men.”
Disagree with the subject of the original post, too. Yes, anime is shallow and generally written to or based off of material thought to appeal to the masses, usually the anime-viewing masses who tend to like their archetypes and their camp. I know I’m a sucker for the tsunderekko swordswomen and bad-boy spellslingers.
But what you get out of any work, whether the author or production team was inspired by a lifetime of deep emotion or some charts put together by marketing, is up to you. I’d think of it as a waste, but it’s certainly possible for someone to tear up over the death of some villain of the week with his last-minute pity-flashback but go unmoved by, I dunno, Flowers for Algernon. (I’m sure there are better examples of moving literature out there, but I’ve got a deathly fear of senility myself.) I’m not trying to say that all writing is equal, but that the differences are only in ability to inspire empathy for the characters, and if you can feel empathy for a cookie-cutter character, nothing but degree makes that different from empathy felt for a character developed over hundreds of pages.
Summarized: ‘it’s what you take out, not what they put in.’
lolikitsune said:
Thankfully for me, I can refer you to the title of this post.
extraclassiclite said:
Since I don’t see what bearing the title of the post has, I’m just going to reiterate my argument in a new form and see if I get a response that doesn’t go over my head:
If you think there’s no romance or love in anime, it’s because you’ve decided to set a bar for how emotionally realistic or well-portrayed a romance has to be to count as romantic, or because you just aren’t moved by the shallow displays anime characters put on, or because you just refuse to believe it based on the commercialistic origins of anime. I don’t buy that a relationship is ‘romance’ if it’s between two realistically-written novel characters but not if it’s between two flatly-characterized walking archetypes, that love is a quantity that can be present or absent in writing. There’s just degree of empathy and intellectual line-drawing.
And if your whole post was satirical and all I’m doing is making the same point you were a lot more clumsily, please just say so plainly. I’m terrible with subtext.
lolicon said:
I’m assuming your post claims that love is inaccurately protrayed in anime. That is when directors try to capture love they fall short of reality.
I don’t know how much anime you’ve watched, but there are shows that capture “love” in its many forms. I think love as friendship is done quite well by even subpar shonen jump type animes. Gankutsuoh is the best example I can think of right now. The love of family doesn’t seem to be approached in anime. For strictly romantic type love, I’d have to agree that almost all animes fall short. I’d blame this on the fact that most “romance” animes fall under dating sim conversions or harem clones. Hence you get stuff like KGNE or Suzuka. I don’t really remember if KGNE really capture “love” since I wathced it such a long time ago.
When I think of love in anime, the first show I think of is Planetes. It deals with love in human relationships in a quite realistic way.
lolikitsune said:
>>I don’t know how much anime you’ve watched
If something like that would affect your comment, you might as well take the two seconds to find out. The number’s on my site, something like one hundred and sixty shows.
>>I’m assuming your post claims that love is inaccurately protrayed in anime.
No, my post makes fun of myself and other anime bloggers by showing why the things we blog about are pointless and uninteresting.