Lolikitean Christmas continues with more Madoka (click for yesterday’s).

I never “shipped” Kyoko and Sayaka the way some have. As some of you may remember, yuri goggles lost their usefulness for me thanks to Erica Friedman treating Aria the way yuri fangirls will. I shouldn’t blame her. In fact, I retract all my previous poison. But she was still wrong, still a bullheaded dipshit, and her obstinate insistence upon reading her fandom and tendencies into everything from Noir to AIR ruined yurispec for me forever.

All this said: the friendship between the two weakest characters in the cast impressed me, and when Kyoko’s scorpion and Sayaka’s mermaid clash in their final fight, I was shaken.

Never forget.

Love & mutual destruction are not infrequently linked.

(ShizNat, anyone?)

Thanks.

EDIT: IT WAS SHANCE UGHHH

Anyway, ghostlightning writes,

In theoretical terms, here is what I am:
I am a post-structuralist by education.
I have a soft-spot for deconstruction.
I am a post-colonial reader by inclination.
I am a structuralist by habit.
I am a liberal humanist by sentiment.

To which all I can say is: bro, you’re trying too hard. Sometimes, there’s more than one truth.

*rimshot*

Following in two spirits—OG LKism and this bizarre notion of actually blogging anime—I shall provide you with an episode summary! SHOKKU!!

Metacommentary is brilliant: Kirino is a hole for our lust.

In a half-hearted attempt to “get TOH out there,” I have added the story to the Melative Experience Engine.

You can go ahead and visit the info page on Melative if you so desire; from there, you can add TOH to your library! Read it, rate it, post idle updates about it! If you’re not familiar with Melative—don’t be scared! It’s pretty awesome. I could describe its greatness here, but that’s really subject matter for another post entirely.

For now, I will leave you with an info dump courtesy of Melative creator Ryan A‘s latest WordPress plugin for… well, for doing this:

Tundra of Heroes (2010) Web

Description

Tundra of Heroes explores three individuals at three points in time, linking their successes and failures to the rise of the oppressive Holy Empire of Byhr.

Part 1 - Juggling Memories
Byhr Year 51. Mr. Jeuni Huros, a juggler and drunk fool, sees his world turned upside-down when he meets—and kills—a mysterious man. The man's death is a promise and Jeuni soon finds himself embarking on a journey he at once needs and hates.

Part 2 - Excavating Time
Byhr Year -20. Grandpa Snow, professor of archaeology, watches the world pass him by. Or maybe he passed it by. Racing against time to complete a book on his work, he tries to reconnect with his childhood dream.

Part 3 - Conducting a Campaign
Byhr Year 23. In spite of his Cressoan descent, fallen aristocrat Tomora Ynthon is an officer in the Byhryn military. In the hopes of exacting revenge against his homeland, he leads a ragtag but loyal unit of wizard soldiers into the northern mountains.

Tundra of Heroes is not-quite-fantasy. The setting is medieval for aesthetic purposes, but there is no grand quest or epic war here. The tundra draws us in and asks us to reflect on policy and religion, while the character-driven conflicts focus on the fallibility of memory and historical records. Ultimately, TOH is a mellow examination of wrongdoings and responsibility.
(via http://tundraofheroes.com)

Length: 23
Theme: religion, history, memory, imperialism, military, magic, performance, music, archaeology
Mood: dark, comedy, romance
Genre: tragedy

Links: TOH Official Website

---

And then the movie isn’t even really about the literature girl in any other sense. She is not the protagonist; we don’t even get her perspective for more than one 10-second scene. The real focus here is Inoue Konoha, a character cast in the mould of such marvelous specimens of manhood as Shinichiro.

As Ryan points out, the main impetus of the plot and the drama in this film comes from his interactions with a cast of secondary characters, all related to him through romance in some way or other.

We have the crazy immature girl, Noe Miu.
We have the red-haired girl, Aiko Nanase.
We have the bro who’s crushing on the red-haired girl, Miyokichi Kazushi.

Literature Girl is a love quadrangle. Where’s Hiromi, you ask? There is no Hiromi.

There are three ‘characters’ vying for Konoha’s attention: Miu, Nanase, and Konoha’s writing.

Miu consistently attempts to undermine Konoha’s freedom and creative expression for her own therapeutic purposes. Nanase sees writing as a proxy for Touko, and knows that Konoha’s involvement in the school literature club equates to his involvement with Touko.

“I was rejected,” she says after Konoha tells her that he wants to write and runs off into the night.

She meant that she’d lost to Touko. The writers meant that she’d lost to writing. They’re both correct, in a sense—the truth isn’t always one thing. But really, much as True Tears was mostly about Shinichiro’s development as an artiste, so too is Literature Girl primarily about Konoha rediscovering his passion and taking up the pen once more.

Of course, Konoha loves Touko. She’s one part megalomaniacal Suzumiya Haruhi to Konoha’s Kyon, two parts obsessive Yomiko Readman to Konoha’s Nenene, and several parts unadulterated selflessness—erring here on the side of Mugi, erring there on the side of Alicia.

And Touko has no intention of competing with Konoha’s writing.

She’s not even a choice in the quadrangle: the moment Konoha runs to her side, she disappears, kawarimi no jutsu, and poof, in her place Konoha is left only with his desire to write.

Why does Touko unilaterally cut herself off from Konoha?

Guilt, maybe—guilt over hogging him for two years. Over forcing him into her club, forcing him to write for her. And maybe that complex hid his true feelings from her; maybe she doesn’t know that he never resented her until the last second before the train doors close. Maybe he even appreciated the heavy-handed encouragement!

But is Touko really clueless? She consistently displays vast insight. Despite her demonic genesis, her only “powers” are completely mundane: she’s good at conflict resolution; she has a vast memory for the contents of books; she has a friend who works at the school planetarium. And with powers like those, mundane though they are, she couldn’t possibly be totally in the dark, right?

She knows Konoha’s feelings, and she makes every decision at every turn throughout the film in an attempt to steer him back toward his novelist career, to push him back into his passion.

And so Literature Girl becomes the movie that isn’t really about Amano Touko, but maybe really, really is: despite not getting much screen time, despite not even being a potential love interest, despite being the supernatural plot hook to a completely mundane tale, Touko ends up being a proxy for Konoha’s true love (writing), not the other way around, and she helps guide our troubled protagonist back to the ‘best end’ of his love quadrangle.

Book title: ‘bungaku shoujo’ (literature girl)

And of course, on a meta level, Bungaku Shoujo (the book) within Bungaku Shoujo (the movie) is definitely about Amano Touko; it is undoubtedly Konoha’s love song to his bibliophile senpai.

P.S.

Seiyuu Stuff: Why did Production I.G. feel the need to hire Shizuka Itou for the sake of one line of dialogue? One useless, useless line of dialogue? Also, if you hate Asakura Miu, you’re not alone! lolikit’s got your back: Miu is yet another incarnation of the paragon ogress herself, Hirano Aya.

Arguably, this will keep fans like me, even if I watch and enjoy some of the contemporary (and popular shows, like K-ON!!), on the outside. Instead of looking forward to shows that appeal to my tastes (a lot of such shows were popular in the past; mostly robot shows and science fiction), I’ll find myself having to adjust my tastes more and more “to keep up” with that of the Japanese audience, if I want to remain interested in anime going forward.

I imagine this in terms of K-ON!! episode 16, wherein I get to be Azusa wanting music (anime) to be a certain way, to have some level of seriousness (so to speak) but instead become carried by the current of indolent cake-eating. Azusa CAN enjoy herself this way, and DOES (like I do enjoy K-ON!! a lot), but this isn’t what she wanted to begin with.

Jun-chan is even further removed, a near-complete outsider but interested in the light music club — like many casual anime viewers I’m acquainted with. They unfortunately wouldn’t get into the K-ON!! kinds of shows — and pretty much act like “tell me when there’s a new Gundam show again, or another TTGLI, or Samurai X, or Ghost in the Shell.” It’s quite a challenge explaining to them what I get out of cake-and-tea girl cartoons where “nothing” happens.

I understand that the Japanese anime industry doesn’t exist for me, much less for my acquaintances who are hardly even invested in it. I’m just sharing this moment when I feel like I understood something about where I am in the scheme of things — which is nowhere of consequence at all.

I saw the challenge of the Ultimate Post call-out, and felt the need to show digiboy that picking strong allies is only one factor in deciding the victor. He got Baka-Raptor, he got ghostlightning—formidable opponents, to be sure, but not the best team players. I used science to determine which trinity of anime bloggers would form the best gattai and, swallowing my pride, called up three old enemies: Jason Miao, Sixten, and Pete Zaitcev.

Surprisingly, they answered my call—Jason seems to have gotten over the fact that my sense of humor uses his as its urinal, Sixten seems to have overcome the trauma dealt him when I told him to remove the “amateur” qualifier from his About page, and Zaitcev seems to have finally accepted the truth about my Night Switch series (that it’s not serious, and thusly not a left-wing alarmist allegory)—and here they are, full of fight, ready to put digiboy in his place.

Please, listen to their song.

J.C. Staff’s A Certain Anime Blog Post, Twittered

In 2008, when J.C. Staff announced that they had acquired the rights to do a movie adaptation of Kazuma Kamachi’s A Certain Anime Blog Post (TOARU ANIME NO BLOG), there was much rejoicing in the aniblogosphere. Here’s an idea of how pumped people were for this thing:

“just read the 6 chapters in one go, pretty good stuff. too bad it’s only one novel…” – boo

“I mean, wow Jason.
I still feel like Kamachi and Haimura should reconcile and continue work on Index, give it another 24 episodes, and that might fix the uneven narrative. They could even shoe in a Kuroko arc!
This new story’s lame in comparison.” – Myssa Rei

“Needs more Index. Cutest one there. No way to have TOARU Anything when Kamachi eliminated all partner artists with penises.” – Haesslich

“Riiiiight. Specifically pick up on the gay innuendo that’s used as a gag. And keep repeating Touma penetrating Stiyl jokes because THAT’S what J.C. Staff was getting at. Don’t worry, though, I still love you jason :)” – Beowulf Lee

Yes, these are my readers… and they weren’t particularly enthralled with the prospect of Blog Post, no. But other bloggers were. Ones more into the whole meta thing. And ones more into J.C. Staff (which really should have folded after Takasu passed up on the Minorin buffet in episode 18). And that’s why Author and Sixten are joining me today as we pick apart the Blog Post movie.

First, to clear up some misconceptions people had about the movie prior to its release in Japan, because these were rampant.

4. J.C. Staff announced a movie, so it’s going to be high quality.

The truth of the matter is that you can only have so many minutes of people looking at a computer screen before the audience gets bored. If people were watching basketball on their computer screens, it might be an interesting exercise in breaking the fourth wall. You could have a show about basketball, but it’s actually about people watching basketball—you could get into the mentality of sports fans, and a lot of people would relate to that.

But no. The Blog Post book is about just that, a blog post. There’s nothing interesting about that. I mean, a fanservice blog at least! Melonpan! But it’s just a blog.

And you can only have so many minutes of that, so they chose to make a movie instead of a TV show.

3. J.C. Staff announced a movie, so it’s going to be at least an hour long.

Nope. It’s almost as if the director, after having spent the entire budget on tacos and lapdances—and subsequently putting the animation studio out of employment temporarily—, wrote in to the producers suggesting that they steal footage from other anime rather than rely on J.C. Staff’s, well, staff.

According to Heisei Democracy, a month before Blog Post hit the theaters, JASRAC smelled blood and cracked down on the already-sorry production. Half of the major animation studios whose content had wound up in Blog Post sued, and so half the movie was simply cut. It’s twenty-seven minutes long… almost short enough for a normal TV spot.

2. J.C. Staff set the release date as May 2010, so they gave themselves a long time to make sure the film would be a masterpiece.

For those who read the original light novel, you know there’s some magic even in something as mundane as a story about an animeblog post. Namely, Kamachi described several bits of web technology that simply didn’t exist back in the day. J.C. Staff—always concerned with realism—decided to consult with Google and subsequently scheduled the film to come out only after Chrome’s speed test videos proved that yes, the internet IS faster than a potato gun.

1. There would be graphs.

I am guilty of this one, I admit—I anticipated an anime about a Japanese anime blogger to include at least one or two graphs. Unfortunately, it seems graphs fell out of fashion in the Japanese-language blogosphere shortly after Spring 2006, and we’ve been following in the footsteps of mediocrity for the past four years.

I would insert a graph of graph decline here, but eh. I need to be trendy.

Well, let’s get down to business, shall we?

Sixten: before Jason scares off all our readers—or worse, encourages people to not watch the film—it should be said that even though this is slice-of-life (bordering on iyashikei, no less), there is still that authentic J.C. Staff tsundere flavor. If you’ve considered selling your soul to J.C. Staff as I did, you can’t afford to miss this movie. I know it’s hard to compete with Haruhi’s disappearance, especially when that movie made it clear that it was serious with Windows 95 footage, but I think true fans such as myself may well end up remembering Blog Post as the best anime of 2010.

Author: I also have a brief note before we get deep into the bones of it. Evirus noted something interesting in an e-mail reply to my post about Pizza Hut:

“Did you wonder about all those fuzzy black squares in Blog Post? I hear the majority of the budget came in the form of Pizza Hut sponsorship; once the news with JASRAC broke that poor director was forced to censor all the Pizza Hut boxes in his show for fear of incriminating the chain.”

“Poor director?”

He’s just lucky he didn’t get AIDS from all those strippers. In any event, you will no longer be confused by the fuzzy black squares!

UPDATE: we’ve updated the post to use screenshots from the uncensored version. Er, the Pizza Hut is still gone, but the black squares are, too! No trace of the pizza chain remains.

lolikitsune: No, stop there, guys. We’re at 2330 words, and the limit is 2500. I know Author is a man of concision, but if you drag Sixten into a digestive discussion this could go on forever. Thank you, all of you.

So the only other person who participated in the contest was digitalboy. He picked the team of ghostlightning, Baka-Raptor, and Shin. He thought he would win. I talked to him yesterday—he still didn’t know I was participating, one day before the deadline—and he told me that baaaawwww, his buddies abandoned him.

I suggested that he publish the current working draft for his ultimate post, and he laughed.

I was thinking about making th epost called ‘Fuck You Guys, I’ll Make My Own Damn Ultimate Post’ and then talk about why these kind of projects fail lol – digiboy

Protip to digi, and, well, to everyone.

The secret to success with group projects such as these is to not rely on anyone else. ;)