Time for some anibloggerality:

Munto sucks as of episode 7; Kyoto Animation turned the once-intriguing Yumemi into a puddle of moe moe jelly and basically sexified everything. lelangir approved; I just want more Gass. Too bad the guy’s dead because he finished pumping his gas. Har. Har. All he wanted to do was BANG BANG take your akuto. *badabum tshhhhhh*

Clannad After Story’s ending is officially balls, I don’t care what the game-playing purists say. Maybe it’s a good adaptation. A good adaptation of shit is still shit. I’m not saying Clannad’s shit, I’m just saying that this scenario is possible. I do know that the execution viewed objectively was weak, and I do know that the ending felt like Mai Hime 26. Only this time there was no Mashiro-chan to fix things, just a loopy plot that somehow had something to do with some nonsensical dreamscape that just didn’t make sense. Also Fuuko is Fffffffffffffffffffuuko. There—you got it, the invective I promised not to deliver.

Anyway, since that’s all the anime I’ve watched recently, I guess I’ll move onto juicier topics like my life. (I’m just too squeezable for my own good. Some might even call me ‘fruity.’)

Yesterday I helped SAKI relocate her bunnies to a new home, if you know what I mean. You probably know what I mean because I mean what I’m saying, and words are words. Which have meanings. Yeah. There was lots of bittersweetness for various reasons, but mostly it was a good day. I read the first chapter of Twilight whilst lingering at SAKI’s place and I must say, it’s a Shaft production waiting to happen. The sickening overabundance of adverbity is not so dissimilar from Shaft’s overabundance of Photoshop filters—meaningless, trite, a disguise that obfuscates none of the shittiness beneath the underneath.

Ate some delicious curry chicken katsu for lunch (apparently, SAKI’s family is more weeaboo FUCKING AWESOME even than I, and as such eats Japanese foods with more regularity than I—which is to say, more than once a year at anime conventions), which was accompanied by several doses of “oh my god I need to not laugh my food across the table.” I hummed some Loituma and got someone else at the table to struggle against the urge to laugh food across the table, and just now I broke the limit of cluttery anti-flow a lolikit can inject into a single sentence and it just keeps going oh my god I’m going to turn into Faulkner at this rate can you believe it? Tick-Tock.

But enough about yesterday—which concluded with a slew of torrenting and taquitos—and onto today. Because apparently, I’m just blogging my life here now or something.

This morning, I attended my philosophy lecture (History of Modern Philosophy, as you might recall from my course list; currently we are studying some B.S. Ethics), and for the first time in a long time I doodled something in my notebook that wasn’t abominable. Well, it might be abominable, but I was not abominated by it. Maybe my standards have fallen. Maybe I was just happy.

After that, I met up with a high school friend back from college on spring break. This was immensely pleasurable, as I missed this friend dearly. She noted that I was more comfortable in my outgoingness than I used to be. This may be the result of my time stuck in a cubicle last semester, or it might be the result of some decking action.

Speaking of decks, could I get some WOWers to level for me? Hurr hurr hurr.

I ate lots of pizza in the company of good friends and then I went home to mom to shit out half my fullness and sleep off the other half. Finally I made it back to the dorms, a place I’d been avoiding for a week as I tended my cat for my out-of-town father, unpacked ten gallons of clothing and damp towels, thought briefly about the fact that I hadn’t watched anime in weeks and how glad I was that I had no idea what the fuck was going on in the aniblogosphere, discovered that ghostlightning’s illustrious blog had attained the coveted 100th post, cursed my fate for now knowing some of what was going on in the aniblogosphere, and subsequently shut myself out of my dormroom, sans computer, in a frantic search for SAKI, who had similarly secluded herself away from a computer.

Apparently, she was in the library stacks on campus, in the deepest and darkest corner of the trollbooth, drawing ambiguously gay porn.

… I love my life.

EDIT: yes, yes, I’ll post her drawings, up in the Rule 34 section, once I feel giving. Right now, I’m not sharing. Use comes before generosity. Now to go fap to my potentially female self…

Majime na Lolikit
How Aria Ruined Subtext, or Why Yuri Isn’t Funny Anymore

In early 2005, I finished watching AIR. At the time, I was active on the AnimeSuki.com forums (handle: Broken), and was active in discussing the episodes as they were aired and fansubbed. In the AIR episode 12 thread, someone linked to lovelykitsune.com‘s special feature. LK had written Misuzu’s final diary entry for her. I laughed my ass off and proceeded to read through the rest of his archives. I gobbled up his Maria-sama ga Miteru reviews like candy. It was, as he himself put it, a writer’s gold mine.

Amazed at how humorous this Maria-sama show appeared to be, I downloaded it (along with Negima and Kanon, some of the first anime I consumed after my introduction to the medium via Naruto) and watched it.

I laughed at the subtext and the ridiculous premise (it’s a lesbian Catholic school lolol) but the show simply wasn’t as funny as Lovely Kitsune had portrayed it. Saddened, I groped for a new angle from which to enjoy it, and eventually I found it: I could amuse myself by looking too far into possible subtext and then laughing at how gay everyone was (it’s a lesbian Catholic school lolol). It wasn’t that I was homophobic (those were turbulent times, and I was seriously considering the possibility that I myself was gay—actually, I still don’t have an answer O_o), but the overabundance of this otherness was more than enough to make me chuckle.

After reading Pretty Face (“Become my onee-sama #2!”) and watching such blockbusters as Mai-HiME (ShizNat) and Kannazuki no Miko (best confession scene ever), I found that I liked this ‘shoujo ai’ business quite a bit. They were so cute, and in a lot of cases they were facing adversity in order to stay true to themselves and their hearts.

A lot of the lulz went away, but the yuri goggles remained.

(What am I talking about? The lulz was as strong as ever. I lurked the shoujoai.com forums for a while and witnessed the first ever declaration of YFR—the hilarious forum interchange that led to me creating kyousora.com and infecting the minds of several other anibloggers.)

Eventually I came upon Strawberry Panic. It made me laugh at the yuri because it was laughable. I blame this entirely upon premise and script. Oh, and the over-dramatization of everything. Around the same time, I was just a fledgling aniblogger. I discovered danbooru. I discovered various other things… like Shoujo Sect… long and short of it is that I came to this revelation: yuri is hot!!

Subtext became even more awesome as I tread into the world of AWESOME Nanoha.

Desires were fulfilled as Kyoushiro to Towa no Sora ended.

And after some time, I saw Aria.

You say good things sometimes, Alice!

Aria’s an odd cookie. Almost entirely female cast, lots of deep caring and emotion, and yet not once—not once did I find a hint of girls’ love, subtextual or otherwise. I found sisterly doting, I found friendship, I found admiration.

Please direct your attention, for a moment, toward this post of Erica Friedman’s: Yuri Anime: Aria OAV Arietta (Thanks to icystorm over at Miminum Tempo for the heads’ up.)

I’ve never been a huge fan of Friedman’s. I know she’s done some great work, etc., but one day I stumbled across some Noir review of hers and it made me cringe. Noir wasn’t yuri as far as I could tell. I recall thinking to myself—is friendship such an impossible thing?

This is, for the record, the same reaction several of my classmates had in Bible as Literature when my teacher presented unto them the theory that David and Jonathan were “romantic friends.” So maybe I just had a preconception of Noir since I’d seen it before and might find the romance between Kirika and Mireille if I were to go into the show with Friedman’s review in mind… but there’s still a distinction, I feel, even between:

- romantic friendship

and

- sexuality

I can’t really imagine David and Jonathan going for that hawt hawt butthsekcz. They definitely did seem like more than (contemporary definition of) friends to me, though. The characters in Noir share an incredibly powerful bond; does that mean that they are a yuri couple? I don’t recall any indications that the two of them felt ANY attraction toward each other, physical or mental or otherwise. I was under the impression that they were brought together by the past, or fate, or something dumb like that, and that perhaps the “odd bedfellows” saying applies.

But a yuri couple?

And I say that same thing to Aria, only a million times over.

Creating something, together—possibly the height of human existence.

When I first watched Aria episode two or whichever, the one where Akari sleeps over in Aika’s room, I probably thought something like, “oooo yuri action oh yeah.” I guarantee that by the time I finished season one, such vulgar thoughts had been completely dispelled. When I say vulgar, I am not incriminating yuri—I am incriminating subtext. Sure, it’s there, and I’m sure people can find it (after all, Erica Friedman did!), but what does it add, other than cheap giggles? If it’s not solid, if it’s not canon, it’s only speculation.

Speculation is something that you get fans to do when you try to entice them with fluff (see: Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu). Did Kozue Amano want use to try to figure out which of the Aria girls were getting off on which others’ fingers? For some reason, I doubt it. Did Mag Garden? Please. It’s there, but only if you’ve trained yourself to find it anywhere can you find it in Aria. Subtext can literally be found in everything if you’re well enough trained.

It’s like over-analyzing things.

I’m not trying to be a deconstructionist, I’m just trying to rationalize—what benefit does Aria gain from lesbianism? I found it quite reassuringly non-retarded that the work just about never touched on sexuality (we know Akatsuki is crushing on Akari and that Aika and Harry Potter get together, but even that doesn’t tell us that much) because, from my point of view, sexuality is a fairly boring topic (though this does not mean that I intentionally ignore it). It’s much more interesting for me to focus on the scenery or the messages or the character drama than the possibilities of who’s attracted to whom. Yes, believe it or not, you can have character drama without romance! Alicia and Akari’s tearful hug in Origination 13 was not the culmination of their lust and sexual tension.

gomenasi, for everything gomenasai

Before you say “but it could be!” let me point you to a very similar scene, both in direction and character action: AIR episode 6; Tohno Minagi returns to her mother’s home and the two share a tearful embrace.

The writer(s) behind AIR had serious mom issues, methinks—there’s a bit of a trend here.

(I refuse to believe that Minagi was hot for her mom. If you think that this is a bad comparison becaue she was hot for her mom, please explain to me why and how she is hot for her mom.)

And because there is nothing explicitly stated in Aria, and because I see no sexuality implied in it, I don’t find any lesbians. Whether the characters ARE gay, or straight, or bi, or what have you, is a pointless question: none of the characters are in yuri relationships. You can spend a lifetime speculating about sexuality if you have no solid cues.

The idea of Aria porn makes me uneasy.

The show is too pure for that. Too innocent. Too much about living a certain way. Not at all about whom to do or why.

Similarly, the idea of pairing Aria characters and doing anything in the vein of fanporn unsettles me, be it fanfic or fanart or so much as discussing one’s support for a coupling. Much as Neo-Venezia is a world beyond disease and homicide, it is a world beyond sex. Such thoughts simply don’t exist in Aria. There was never anything about dating or societal pressures to fulfill gender roles and get into certain relationships or making babies or not making babies or defying a conservative society or taking advantage of a liberal one. None of these topics are touched upon, thus furthering the detachment from sexuality.

And with all the unbridled potential for yuri (a full cast of females at the extremes of hot or cute in terms of both appearance and personality), combined with this total absence of sexuality, I have completely lost my drive to examine subtext or find lesbians in anime.

I don’t see the point anymore.

Why seek cheap laughs or pursue fetishes when something so perfect, so pure, so devoid of questions exists? Aria is the end-all be-all of my anime experience, and it has vanquished my love for yuri. It has vanquished my love for giggling childishly at possibilities.

Aria killed subtext.

And one last note, in case any staunch Aria yuri fans are reading this:

If Akari and Alicia were in a lesbian relationship, would Alicia have left to go get married to some other person? Alicia is mature. She doesn’t need to graduate schoolgirl lesbianism.