Aelanie wrote:

Please don't. The intentional infliction of that manga upon pristine human minds is something that I could only consider an atrocity.

Yeah but...like...I'm an Akio fan. Atrocity turns me on. ...why the fuck else would anyone read this shit?



(Don't worry I'm also, like Akio, very lazy. But damn this is a fun read in the way that watching old people fall from stairs is entertaining.)

BTW, apparently the internet hasn't changed at all, because someone on the ANN forum used the article to call us shit superfans and something something expensive cels? It's funny because I would in theory agree, having my site survive the longest doesn't entitle me to be the boss of the fandom...but 1. I've never suggested I'm a super anything but fatass, and 2. hey I shit on my site as much as the next guy but saying EM contributes nothing but its age is a bit horseshit when about 50% of the images on Tumblr are in some way from the gallery. I know because of the pixels, meaning I literally assembled all these pixels and know my own work from anyone else's.

But yes, as someone on the internet that attracts even slightly more attention than none whatsoever, this is the first time someone's pointed out that I'm garbage and superfans are lame.

Aelanie wrote:

Please don't. The intentional infliction of that manga upon pristine human minds is something that I could only consider an atrocity.

We have recently embraced the title of Internet Atrocity Tourists. It is the only label I have given myself thus far, and I intend to live up to it. I am all for a Let's Read thread.

Reposting this from tumblr:

Anecdote time:

When ANN asked us to write an article, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it. I mean, I loved the idea and was all for it, but I had an injury that was really, really inconvenient for writing... and it was the SKU fandom’s fault! (sort of)

Two days beforehand, I had celebrated my birthday for the first time in five years. It was just a small gathering, but half the people there were people I’d met because of the fandom, my closest friends. That night I was making something involving oysters for dinner, and one of my fandom friends, S, had both bought the oysters and promised to teach me how to shuck them using an oyster knife. Now, in case you don’t know, oyster knives are super, super blunt except for a pointy tip. I was excited because I’d never done it before... aaaaaand we’d all been drinking. I’m sure you can guess what happened next.

Me: shit. huh.

S: oh shit Gio we need you

Gio: oh my god you need stitches

Me: NO, I’m fine, I don’t even feel it

Gio: No you should really get that stitched up

Me: LOL *waving bloody hand around* IT’S FINE SEE get me another drink

Gio: oh my god you’re stupid, fine but you have to put some gauze and stuff on it

Me: rofl you guys are wimps, HEY EVERYONE COME CHECK IT OUT I STABBED THE SHIT OUT OF MYSELF

Soooo... two days later, there I am with punctured hand (and still a little hung over). It’s fine. It doesn’t hurt so much. I’m not even taking painkillers for it. And then we get the email from ANN, and Gio says, “I need you to write the first draft of this, I’m working too much to do it."

Sigh. I left it as long as I could so I could have some time to heal up. Still, it was a six hour stretch of writing and when I was finished my hand was swollen so that I could barely close my fingers and SO painful.

And that’s the story of how the fandom sort of caused this gnarly new scar on my hand and also made me wish I was dead while writing an upbeat retrospective on SKU. Cheers!

Also, lol. Someone called us shit superfans. lol. It's not the first time I've ever heard that, but umm... if EM and IRG didn't exist, we would basically have the Escaflowne fandom right now. Not saying we as people are supergreat or anything, but EM is basically the nerve center of the fandom, and will continue to be so until someone builds something bigger and better. Gio and I are not important. The site is important as a collection of resources, and a gathering place for fans.

SaigonAlice wrote:

But I still believe my point on Yaoi stands, the genre is by and large a cesspool.

Seconded. Even just from brushes with friends who read it, I have noticed that it is fucking awful. I never even tried to get into it even though guys together are hot, because most of it was just so fetishistic that I didn't even have to read it to know that. I don't have the time to sift through that junk to find the good stuff.

SaigonAlice wrote:

And y'all I just read a bit of Shitsuraken....I think I need take a small breather. Please excuse me. O_O

I TOLD YOU TO STAY AWAY. YOU CHOSE THIS. YOU'LL LISTEN NEXT TIME I BET. NEVER DOUBT ME AGAIN.

.....

God damn it. It's spreading like cancer, and it's all my fault.

Seriously people, stop. I know what I'm talking about. I took the mental scars so you don't have to. There are things people are better off not seeing, not knowing, not experiencing. Trust and believe that I am protecting you, and STAY AWAY.

Last edited by Aelanie (02-16-2017 09:57:42 PM)

Arale wrote:

I'd, like an idiot, read Shitsurakuen if it was published in English. Scanlations are like never up to par for me.

I don't think the quality or lack thereof is going to be very relevant for this one.

That's two hours I'll never get back, but I have no regrets. I stared into the abyss and it stared back with huge tits and said 'But if only one guy can abuse you, that's better than all of them doing it, so this is great!'

No seriously, it's complete shit, it's like someone watched SKU without absorbing a single thing from it except females in bondage good, domination cool, fights awesome. Either someone just made a paycheck trolling the entire manga reading populace, or they believed this was good and meaningful, and I don't know which is a better proof for that the entire planet should just have an OS reinstall.

The real irony is...I actually really like the artwork. Sad that it was put to such unfathomably terrible use. But that's true of a lot of amazingly talented artists who employ their skills drawing horrendous guro-porn.

"Super-fans" seems to really have hurt a few people in the comments over there. Among other things. Tee. And, hee.

But, Gio and Yasha, you are important!

Arale wrote:

When I think of two-decade-old anime I don't think of masculinity at all, I think of stuff like Perfect Blue, Lain and of course Utena. Stuff that represented femininity as psychological.

I think, what it really comes down it is not "I want anime to be what it was," for the people who're worked up about this, but that they want all anime to be what they first liked.

Cute girls or girly-girl anime aren't, either of them, remotely new things. I supposed "tough young guy has adventures" anime were more likely to be released in anglophone markets than other types twenty/twenty-five years ago, though, and it was probably these folks' bread and butter.

Like with any medium or any niche fandom, there's tons of little sub-group myopic perspectives and a forer effect in full swing.

SaigonAlice wrote:

Which is why I consider shows like Yuri!!! on Ice which feature healthy M/M relationships as not being yaoi, really, since it's so divorced from the usual yaoi tropes

This is the problem with "yaoi," isn't it? Especially in anglophone circles, it's taken to mean several things, not all of which are agreeable with one another.

I tend to want to limit "yaoi" to short, get-to-the-sex manga or anime, and use BL or ML for other works, or more specific qualifiers.

When you go back to the 70s and 80s and the early BL hits, as it were, they're not really by straight women. Moto Hagio is pretty quiet about her personal life, but she's also carefully not presenting herself as straight, either, which was risk enough back then. There's a queer sensibility, that isn't a gay male sensibility, built into the early watershed works, which were usually by people who were all over trans and body dysmorphia stories, as well.

It's the people who came out of specifically yaoi (when it was an acronym?) circles who tend to have the less-follow-through/less-consequences yaoi stereotypes, which still aren't really out of line for other kinds of romance comics or porn, comparatively.

Giovanna wrote:

Decrescent Daytripper wrote:

"Super-fans" seems to really have hurt a few people in the comments over there. Among other things. Tee. And, hee.

Well we didn't pick the title and that's not the phrase I would use either. I don't like the term super-fan just because it sounds douchy but if one accepts the concept as existing, and one pretty safely can, I would say within the realm of SKU, we would qualify as well or better than anyone else I can think of. If you're talking about like, Sailor Moon or something, on the scale of that fandom we would probably be smaller potatoes.

You are super-fans. Deal. Celebrate!

We sometimes lead with "I'm as big a ______ fan as any of you," at the Cube, because it inevitably ties a certain reader in knots and, well, we want to. Some people are too serious, especially when it comes to that word.

The flipside being when the word is used to mean anyone who even knows the thing exists or has talked about it, positively or negatively, online.

It's super rare to find something that feels like the older stuff but also still flips the same switches for older fans as the old stuff did then.

Stranger Things, judging by my nieces, hits its niche square on, across generations. But, whatever the Sailor Moon of right now is, comparatively, probably looks like Nurse Angel Ririka to "us." I don't even know what, performatively, the current Utena would be. I think we're all too old and jaded to tell. And, we wouldn't listen to the teenage anime fans if they told us, because pffft.

Aelanie wrote:

As humans we tend to think that nothing is truly new, and as such it follows that nothing in the past was either. But that's not true. With every expanding medium, there is a period where things really are new and novel, and works come into being that had never been dreamt of before. It is these kinds of works that shape and define the future of their medium forever as it inevitably settles into an ever-more regimented and defined state,  just as the universe has settled into its current state from its chaotic and energetic beginning.

Without question, Sailor Moon and Utena were two of these. For Sailor Moon, it was the fusion of shoujo romance and magical girl formula with sentai (Power Rangers-style battle team) elements, as well as subversive elements like the both female and male gay romance hints. It was all so much more novel and daring back then - and that goes tenfold for Utena. Simoun is the only thing that has ever come close to Utena's bizarre and eclectic melding of so many genres and themes in a successful way.

Those are both shows that came after over fifty years of anime. Sailor Moon debuts eighty years after the first animation in Japan, and over seventy years after the first commercial Japanese animation. They both have interesting bastard formats, combining and recombining genres and sub-genres in a novel fashion, but they weren't, for all that, even 70% (totally made up percentage for illustrative purposes) new. I'm not even that comfortable with saying Sailor Moon is that novel for combining magical girl tropes with team-fights-monsters tropes, because most of those tropes were already held in common, anyway. What Sailor Moon did was do it in an exciting and appealing way.

Is Simoun the only thing comparable to Utena's melding of genres and themes, in all of anime?

How do you even measure that?

Virtually everything in both series had been dreamt before, and had been broadcast or played with before.

Most of what feels new in anime, or any medium, feels new because the audience that it works for the most aren't familiar with waves of predecessors and influences, while, generally, the staff on the productions are. You don't get Evangelion with Ideon, you don't get Sailor Moon or Utena without Cutey Honey (actually, in respect to major players in Eva's staff, you don't get it, either), but we can't isolate Ideon, Cutey Honey, or any other watershed or highly influential anime and not pull it back apart until you see where virtually everything came from.

When Utena was still broadcasting, it was being compared to the wave of anime in which is came (and in some cases came a little later), but also those then-twenty-year-old productions that were its clearest influences. Same with Sailor Moon. Etc. They're more "there's nothing ever been like this," for audiences who were new enough to the genres.

I don't think

Aelanie wrote:

that anime has both "settled" and contracted since that time.

Especially since it's been at least twenty years since "that time."

Twenty years is too long to nutshell like that, especially when the landscape twenty years ago was in no way uniform, either. And, we have seen advances, technical and artistic. If it had settled and contracted, we shouldn't see progression, we'd have just seen regression and everything would look like 90s anime, which is doesn't.

Aelanie wrote:

Very few shows are willing or able to take risks anymore, and those that do are seldom rewarded for doing so. Sometimes it still does happen that a skilled team manages to come up with something that feels fresh, takes chances, and the audience buys into it. I would posit Puella Magi Madoka Magica as such an example in recent years - but in fact, I feel that that show was itself drawing on the legacies of both Sailor Moon and Utena.

There was a brief snapback, around the time Utena was ending, where broadcast anime on certain stations was being actively limited in what they could get away with. This was because, shows that had to be preempted for content or censored by the station for content was becoming so common it was commercially and legally untenable.

That snapback only lasted a few years and it spawned the midnight anime and satellite-station releases that did, even for essentially dumb shows, push things forward.

Excel Saga, like it or not, pushed the medium forward in terms of what you could air. Adventures in Beauty Wonderland pushed the medium forward in terms of what outside content anime can engage and how. Cowboy Bebop fundamentally altered anime's nature of release. I haven't really seen that Rintaro, just to pick one director, has rested on their laurels or produced only fluff of puff since the 90s ended. Or, Miyazaki, for another.

There's a lot of fluff and a number of safe productions. There always are.

Advances aren't quality. Quality isn't objective. Novelty is good, but novelty isn't quality, and it isn't unmatchable or Noozles/Fushigi na Koala Binky would be unparalleled.

Aelanie wrote:

Decrescent Daytripper wrote:

Excel Saga, like it or not, pushed the medium forward in terms of what you could air. Cowboy Bebop fundamentally altered anime's nature of release.

You're only proving my point though, in that the works of that period had powerful and permanent effects on the future direction of the medium. Naturally, Sailor Moon and Utena were not wholly "new" in what they presented. Utena's thematic precursors are Rose of Versailles, Kanashimi no Belladonna, Onii-sama e, and many others I'm sure. However, whether or not they could be said to be novel in their content, they were undeniably novel in their influence, shaping and defining anime in ways not seen before or since, layering on the strata of ideas and practices that form the medium. Both you and I have admitted we can't really come up with something that has had an analogous course-altering effect on anime as a whole in recent years - though obviously the caveat should be acknowledged that such influences are often only visible, or at least only fully appreciated, in retrospect. Adventures in Beauty Wonderland is an interesting piece visually, no doubt, but has it forever altered the mindsets and practices of the people who both watch and create anime?

Beauty Wonderland was a big jump in terms of serious non-story animation in Japan and repairing the bridge between commercial and fine art appropriation of anime tropes that had been growing more and more tenuous since the late 80s. I'm looking for measurable effects, and I think there, as with Cowboy Bebop or even FLCL, you can show pretty measurable changes, changes that are probably advances. That's regardless of the quality of the works, which is always going to be a subjective thing. I like Utena more than Cowboy Bebop, but the nature of its release was an advancement for the industry. I like Fake more than Yuri, but the nature of Yuri's release is an advancement for the industry.

We agree up to a point on most of the core matters, but has Utena really been "course-altering" for anime as a whole? I can think of ways it has been influential to other works, but nothing it did fundamentally altered the artistry, commerce, or nature of release of anime as a medium or industry, did it?

I adore Utena, I'm all over it, but at the same time, I can't trace a lot of significant advances it made that then stuck on with further anime. (Weirdly, it might have had more influence on British hauntology music, as a number of people involved in that were also deeply into Utena for awhile.)

For that matter, I'm pretty sure Rose of Versailles, in particular, was novel in its content upon release. What else played like that, at its time?

I'm not trying to also undersell, particularly Utena and Sailor Moon, but... lots of Sailor Moon was formulaic before it was even made as Sailor Moon. If anime had stopped with Sailor Moon and other 90s anime, and just contracted from there, we wouldn't have Your Name or Charlotte (but if the 90s anime hadn't existed, we also wouldn't have them as they are). I don't think you can even make a case that quality hit its peak there, and point to Sailor Moon (which I love).

Decrescent Daytripper wrote:

I can think of ways it has been influential to other works, but nothing it did fundamentally altered the artistry, commerce, or nature of release of anime as a medium or industry, did it?

But it did, by being one of the works that helped give birth to an entire commercial subgenre - the era of modern yuri, as I've explained elsewhere:

Utena is not only a yuri anime, but it is actually one of the three pillars that founded modern yuri as we know it in the late 90s, along with Sailor Moon and Maria-sama ga Miteru. The success of these titles and the resulting fan groundswell is what showed publishers that there was a real market for female/female romance, and thus it began to take cohesive form in the early 2000s.

However people wish to characterize the in-show depiction of Utena and Anthy's relationship, it had a profound influence and effect on the nascent fandom of female/female romance and its future as a viable endeavor by publishers. Numerous now-legendary yuri artists got their start by watching Utena and drawing doujins of it, and the raw success of Utena while including those elements paved the way for more exploration of them in both anime and manga. As noted, it does not stand alone in this accomplishment, but the importance of Utena in this light cannot be overstated.

Yasha wrote:

Decrescent Daytripper wrote:

But, Gio and Yasha, you are important!

Not in the sense that I'm talking about. We are interchangeable-- it could be anyone running the site, and mostly the same contributions would be made. That we are personally important to some people in the fandom is different, although very much valued

Interchangeable?  I would beg to differ.

My experience with online fandom hasn't exactly been exhaustive, but it has lead me to the belief that bastions of decency are a rare commodity, they require a lot from their creators and mods, and IRG is one such bastion.
  Sure, someone else could have created the site and forum and kept it running, but it's likely that it wouldn't have been the healthy community that it is, and people wouldn't come and stay the way they do, and because of that, in fan circles at least, SKU would be a lot less prominent than it is.

So, y'know, don't sell yourself short.  What may seem obvious to you is clearly fucking rocket science to the populace at large, and you are much appreciated for it, apart from personal importance.