Frivolous Pictures

(Literal translation of "manga", post about manga and anime. Incidentally, anime were sometimes called "manga eiga" (cartoon movies) up till about a decade after Gundam, which is still their name in Korea (manhwa yeonhwa).)

• How is it that Upotte!, which I like, but which is rather blatantly a moe series for gun-nerds, has an anime, but "Hajimete no Aku" doesn't? HajiAku is about a girl who finds out a couple of out-of-work supervillains will be living with her. It quickly becomes a school-life series, with only the occasional nod in the direction of supervillainy, but it's still damned entertaining.
  
  I wonder, speaking of, do the Japanese understand that in America, superheroes haven't been for kids since the 70s? The paradigm in HajiAku is basically one from Power Rangers and other sentai shows for elementary schoolers (it's a comedy series); with the exception of the animated Teen Titans, American superhero media is almost exclusively for people out of high school. (Seriously, the amount of it that deals with the troubles of middle age, though DC's rather ham-handed New 52 might have partly fixed that, is ridiculous.)
• It's amusing to me to note how anime is still lauded as some kind of bastion of homophilia, by the sort of high-school- and college-aged Susie Soapbox who thinks GLAAD is a civil rights group. It's amusing because no, anime is exactly where they were in 1995, if not a titsch more conservative, in their portrayals of homosexuality, while American media has been doing its damnedest (for fear of having to embark on a GLAAD-demanded Repentance and Reeducation Tour) to shoehorn gay characters and issues into every show and every plot, no matter how superfluous the addition. According to the stats, one character in 66 (1.5%) ought to be gay. Given most shows have, oh, six characters, one of whom is gay pretty much always nowadays, Hollywood appears to believe that there are more gays than Hispanics in our country (then again, the same may be said for Jews and Blacks, both of whom are also outnumbered by Hispanics, except in media).
  
  And don't think the Japanese haven't noticed. It's actually gotten to the point where Yoshii from BakaTest, complaining about his exhibitionist sister and her habit of hitting on his female friends (probably just to troll him—she's arguably never revealed her real sexuality), can yell "You've been corrupted by your time in liberal America!" (Liberal here meaning "libertine", not either of its political senses.)
• Also amusing to note is the number of people who don't seem to know the reason premodern Japan valued homosexuality was, mainly, misogyny—"Why would you want to fall in love with a mere woman?" And that the main form of homosexual relationship was pederasty.
  
  With the exception of (the unwatchably Occidentalist) Samurai Champloo, no Japanese period-drama, anime or otherwise, shies away from pointing out the ugly underbelly of their previous sexual mores—also RE: women, e.g. punitive rape and daughter-selling. A part of that is just cheerleading for progress, Things Are So Much Better Now Than In The Bad Old Days, of course, but sometimes progress actually exists.
• Speaking of anime and progress, is anyone else amused by the fact Sabre, in Fate:Stay/Night, secretly used to be King Arthur, but she disguised herself as a man because they'd never follow a woman? Now, aside from the fact women occasionally led troops throughout the Middle Ages (Joan of Arc wasn't one of them, though), Arthur was a Roman Briton.
  
  Seriously, did nobody point out the name "Boudicca"? Hell, for that matter, one of the other heroes they meet is Cu Chulainn. The writers (of the original game) must've researched his legend, in order to know what his spear was called: so why didn't they notice his enemies were following a queen, Medb of Connaught?
• Remember ages ago, when I mentioned that n00b on something saying tengu would be immune to the "Elf Superiority Complex", because of reincarnation? Well, aside from the issue I mentioned there, about how tengu are pretas, reincarnated as such for their sins, or the one I can't believe I didn't, namely that belief in reincarnation hasn't kept anyone in Asia from having pride in their bloodlines, there's another issue.
  
  Specifically, tengu are the personification of Superiority Complex. You know how sometimes, in anime and manga, a character who's getting a swelled head will have their nose grow long? Guess what type of yokai has a long nose? The tengu take great pride in being the greatest martial artists under heaven; many martial arts styles, notably Yagyû Shinkage swordsmanship, call their most advanced techniques "the Tengu Sequence".
• The second series to combine moe with the Cthulhu Mythos, Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, is really, really bad. Aside from how you cannot have a Lovecraftian series, even one played for laughs, where Lovecraft's books existed, at one point the protagonist says "Gee, who would've thought the creatures of the Cthulhu Mythos were aliens?"
  
  Uh, how about, anyone who's read even one single story from the Mythos? It's pretty up-front about it.
  
  Also, if you make Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, Who Is the Very Soul and Messenger of the Elder Gods, a ditzy girl space-cop à la Mihoshi in Tenchi, I hope you meet him.
• It's always fascinating to me how fantasy manga and anime (and games) with a quasi-Western setting don't even bother with the "Renaissance, Medieval, we don't know the difference" type of setting Western works use. No, rather, they go with an eighteenth or even nineteenth century setting. While guns and tailcoats are cool, and I for one could stand to see more Western fantasy use them (especially guns), the social order of those eras was different. Sure, most Western fantasy writers read post-Reformation absolutism back into the Middle Ages—but the 18th and 19th centuries were the era of liberalism and the Republic, where even the toffs in Westminster talked citizenship and the rights of man (a little later, they would talk Socialism—none of the ideology they learned to parrot had any influence on their policies, of course).
  
  Someone needs to take Japanese writers aside and remind them that the setting used for most fantasy stories is contemporary with their country's Sengoku Era (the Middle Ages, meanwhile, is contemporary with the later Heian). You'd no more have tailcoats and flintlocks than you'd have pleated hakama or samurai as swordsmen.
  
  Oh wait, they do always depict Sengoku samurai as swordsmen.
• So the Japanese word for "obligation" is "on". There's another "on" that means "resentment", as in "Ju-On", original title of The Grudge. They're spelled differently (well, they're written with different kanji—恩 and 怨, respectively—but that's basically the same thing), but they're very close concepts; an obligation that can't be fulfilled actually becomes a resentment, hence why gift-giving in Japan is so complicated.
  
  On is also counting syllables (yes, yes, technically "mora"—long vowels and nasalizations count as extra morae even though they don't increase the number of syllables—but let's not toss around technical terms all willy-nilly), but that seldom comes up in the same contexts as the other Ons.
  
  Aum, too, is "on" in Japanese, mostly because that's how you pronounce it in Sanskrit, but that, too, seldom comes up in the same contexts (though it might come up in the same context as the "resentment" one, since resentment is what brings ghosts back and one might banish them with mantras).