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It really depends on the series, but I think there's some value to be had in examining this phenomenon under the auspice of wider culture. There is a tendency in anime to give characters Caucasian features and Japanese names, and whiteness is certainly considered "cool" and desirable in Japan. This is really interesting, because Japan has a history of insular policy and even today there are significant portions of the population that resent foreign influence. Japan looks so be undergoing a cultural contradiction, both holding true to its valued traditions and embracing the West, going as far as nearly deifying Western physical features.
I can't help but think it's kind of sad. Western influence in Japan really got underway after WWII and therefore the atomic bombings, so it's almost as though there's a fragment of fear powering the way in which Western stuff has become stylish over there. Mind you, I'm all for the free sharing of culture and the destruction of interpersonal barriers, but I wish something else could have been the catalyst for this kind of thing.
Not that I'm qualified to reach any conclusions, anyway. But I suspect there's a kind of cultural identity crisis on some levels. Then again, I might be entirely wrong; this kind of thing is usually in anime, manga and video games, two of which are often considered inappropriate for hard-working adults. But if children and teenagers grow up with Western traits idealised, well, that more or less speaks for itself.
Natural skin colors mean very little to me in both RL and fiction, with the only exception being "excessively dark skinned" and I mean excessive, when I say that.
For instance, because the darkness on this guy's skin:
wasn't excessive enough, I had assumed that he was, in fact, just a tanned Japanese man, since the participants in that anime is 10,000 customers of a virtual reality videogame in Japan. As far as I remember, there wasn't a mention in the anime so far about him being specifically an African living in Japan either, and I only learned he was, in fact, not an actual Japanese person because of learning through external info.
^I don't really think there is much of a "Western-appearance glorification" going on at all, personally. Mostly since I don't see them desiring higher amounts of body hair on average, larger noses, or freckles. It just happens to be that pale skin and more open eyes along with better stature happens to be appealing, or something.
Like, rather than "we want this because it is Western" it's "we want this because it's pretty", and due to the natural occurrences anyway, saying that something "belongs to X because it tends to happen to them more often" is strange, IMO. It would be sort of like saying "Steel is European, because it is more common within our resources" and "Those Asians living on small land use steel because they want to be European" rather than "Those Asians living on small land use steel because it is durable, available, and suited for whatever purpose they are using it for"
Just finished serial experiments: lain; I am full of positive emotions. I wrote a more in-depth post about this elsewhere, but here are a few relevant points:
- There are a zillion possible explanations for what the heck is going on, and the wonderful thing is that so few of them are really contradictory given the nature of the narrative. Is it about the Internet? Naturally. What about mental illness? Of course. Religion? The nature of love? Conspiracy theories? Jungian archetypes? Yes. It's a banquet of fabulously strange ideas.
- Lain herself (circa episode eight especially) is probably now at the top of my informal "characters in fiction that deserve a hug" list. Seriously, that poor girl. Even if you take a lot of the more surreal stuff in the series at face value, having to endure the slow destruction of your own reality is a pretty a terrifying thing, especially given what we know about the character. And considering how closely Konaka's plotting cleaves to the progression of a psychotic break...
- Speaking of which, when this show goes for "disturbing," it goes for the gold and wins it. This show is, at points incredibly unsettling in that slow-boiling paranoid way, all the more because you are often experiencing it directly from the characters' perspectives. Yet this also throws everything one sees in the series into question, as my above points should have made clear. This is not a bad thing.
Lain is really cute in her bear suit.
That's what I got out of Serial Experiments Lain.
speaking of lain
I have this habit of completely forgetting what an anime is about after not thinking about it for long enough
which means i'll have to watch lain again to refresh my knowledge of it >_>
at least it won't annoy my eyes though (a lot of old anime do that to me for whatever reason)
I honestly thought I understood Lain pretty well.
Some of the references went over my head ("Think Blue, Count One Tow" anyone?) but that's about it.
The only things I really watched this Summer were Binbougami Ga! and Natsuyuki Rendezvous, that wasn't what I expected...
This season I'm trying to be a little more planned, but since the stuff I want to pick up will probably not fit into my schedule I'm sticking with Zetsuen no Tempest (Which I still haven't seen) for weekly. I'll just marathon everything else on my list in December.
I haven't seen any anime from start to finish this year. And all the ones I saw any of were pretty old (the oldest being Outlaw Star, which I haven't seen since it was new and I was very little) and the most recent being the still-lacking-a-dub Nichijou.
@DYRE: Oh, the bear suit is adorable. And symbolic.
I want that bear suit.
I am almost certain that they sell them.
Wow. The television adaptation of Berserk ends on an incredibly ambiguous... it just ends. What the hell.
I still enjoyed the series quite a lot, but man, I'm not even angry, just vaguely baffled.
^ I think that's up there with David Tibet's cat-hat as one of my favourite examples of cute yet ridiculous animal-themed clothing.
It's just one arc of the manga, unfortunately, and a flashback at that. The manga opens with some generic actiony stuff then goes back to examine Guts' origin story. Berserk is a great manga, but it doesn't really start off so well, and the arc the anime follows is where it earnestly begins to live up to its reputation.
On the bright side, there's another anime adaptation on the way.
I'm aware of those facts, and I fully intend to start reading the manga at some near-future date. But that doesn't make it any less of a strange, abrupt way to end a series, particularly that kind of series.
I've heard mixed things about the first film adaptation, mainly about the animation and the pacing, but it could be interesting to compare the three at some date. That, and adaptations of the later arcs should be intriguing.
It certainly doesn't make the anime any less strange, but I didn't want you to get the wrong idea about Berserk as a whole. It's a great series, even if it updates at a snail's pace.
Also, given recent discussion, leaving this here seems appropriate.
So Zestuen no Tempest has a really good first episode.
While the first half of the episode felt like most of Nami Tamaki's new music (That is, I couldn't decide whether it was genius, a little too much or just really stupid) when the answers started coming out it felt really solid and that fight between Mahiro and Fraulein was nice. The music is fitting (The opening theme is oddly enough, a surf-rock song, but it's a good surf-rock song). I can't wait to see where this is going.
The only thing that worries me is Mahiro, who is the ultimate ticking time bomb in gaining an annoying ambiguous characterization (if that makes sense).
YES. 2013 is going to be the best year ever! (For sequels/spinoffs/adaptations, that is).
^^ I still enjoyed the show greatly, as I said. It had its problems, but the art, story and characters were all superb. Hence, why I'm going to read the manga.
Also, the latter part of that rant strikes me as decent advice, from my context-free perspective. Is it good advice in context?
Theoretically. It goes horribly and hilariously wrong.
Wooooooooooooooooow. Magi's first episode has impressed me quite a bit. Ali Baba and Aladdin and Morgiana! on the way to earn all Djinn!
^^ Oh dear. I can imagine it would.
I'm watching Paranoia Agent now. It's rocking my socks.
I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or not that I have barely exposed myself to any truly bad anime (save for brief peeks at the "classics" of awfulness through reviews and the like).
^Because you don't get the urge to deliberately watch bad shows for the sake of schadenfreude?
Re-re-rere-re-re-rewatching Darker than Black.
I like this show quite a bit.
I started watching The iDOLM@STER for this purpose. I figured I would be snarking about it for several episodes and then I'd get bored. I was like, here's an anime series with too many cute girls and a rather silly premise. This can't end well.
...I was wrong.
^^^ But I enjoy making fun of bad things...
@ClockworkUniverse: Out of curiosity, dub or sub?
^^^ Why would you expect the iDOLM@STER to be bad? What reason did it have to be bad? At absolute worst it would have been unremarkable and boring, which still isn't really suitable for making fun of.
Well, considering that my previous familiarity with the series was a video of Miki flirting with the Producer by asking him to role-play as a sexual predator, plus maybe a song or two, here's what I knew of the series going in:
* way too many female characters. Given that the Producer is male, I figured this probably means a harem and/or some sort of romantic slice-of-life series (probably a comedy given the bright colors) with love triangles and dodecahedrons and more. And even if it doesn't, it's probably going to be chock full of fanservice of all sorts just for the hell of it (from beach episodes to pillow fights to shower scenes etc.), and will end up being boring if I actually care about the evolution of the plot.
* it's about pop idols, specifically. So this is probably going to involve them doing random stuff because cute and then going on stage and singing. The portrayal of pop musicians' careers is probably also going to be way heavily idealistic and extremely unrealistic.
Instead, I got a relatively realistic portrayal of the pop musician career (not all that realistic, but far better than my expectations, at least), and there was very little fanservice (if anything, fanservice was portrayed negatively at at least one point), and the characters, instead of being cute for the sake of being cute, actually had interesting personalities which gave me a large and varied cast from which to choose my own favorites to follow. The plot also wasn't a pointless slice-of-life comedy either; it actually went somewhere, it gave the cast character development, and it contained quite a bit of drama as well as several really emotional, touching moments.
And I enjoyed the music, generally speaking.
Someone tell me how in the world these two people are the same age?Art evolution.
More like, they were designed by different people at different times as part of different projects, so of course they'll look different.
Really, the bigger question is why the Smile Cures are all supposedly 14, but are only about as smart as 8 year olds. Even the smart one. (the answer is that Precure is a show for 8 year olds, but it's still not a very satisfying answer)
nvm
^^ They at least sound smarter (Especially Reika, she should be a poet or something) than the average 8 year old. And it's so worth it just to see how insanely happy Miyuki can get.
... it's times like these I forget that Fresh! Precure was set in Middle School.
Which is why Tsubomi and Erika look like their little sisters? (If we disregarded the difference in head size...) Even Kanade and Hibiki look younger than the Fresh girls.