More than a Feeling
It is a hyperbole. But I believe human beings invent to satisfy a need. Words included. GAR is more than a feeling, but also a need to describe the feeling. The same applies to moe. And blogosphere.
Without dwelling on too much meta nonsense, I just want to talk shop about Kaori Sakiyama for a minute.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I really enjoyed Air Master during its brief, 27-episode run half a decade ago. Despite a botched attempt at English-language distribution by Toei, there are rumors of its resurrection, hopefully, through the Crunchyroll-Toei deal. It’s not something that is definite however.
And plainly put, Kaori Sakiyama is GAR. But five years ago there were no such a term; people like myself had to resort to more pedestrian methods to sing songs about this no-nonsense but extremely…shallow(?) individual. Actually I don’t think she’s even that. There’s this drive in her that is legendary in proportions. And for someone who has such a badass attitude, she expresses it through her not-so badass physical prowess.
In fact, I think that is what made her so GAR, so to speak. It’s a kind of reverse-moe. It isn’t like Sakiyama makes you want to protect her, God forbid. It’s because she is just a girl without any special abilities or inhuman strengths. She was not given talents on birth or a backbreaking training in the relevant arts at a young age. But as fighters, real and fantastic, know, much of the game is inside your head. Sakiyama’s extreme, whatever-the-means mentality only heaps mountains worth of respect as we see her gets pummeled fight after fight even with hard work, upgrades, and other nonsense. Brutally so. She wins the mind games, but loses in the actual fights. You know she’s not stupid, but yet she stands to challenge what seems to be the impossible.
It triggers a feeling of injustice, I guess. It can be hard to see someone who has worked so hard and gone to extremes to satisfy her semi-demented ego size of Alaska, only to get put down just because her opponent is the protagonistbetter gifted and better trained in reality.
Even if it may be unfair, it is a huge contrast with the typical Japanese stick-your-head-down-and-bear-with-it mentality. It is definitely NOT the well-tread formula of hard work + sweat + heart = win. If anything, Sakiyama is a smack-talking, smashmouth football-playing monster as that’s part of the psychological game. From another perspective, it complements the whole Air Master, Mixed-Martial-Arts angle, offering readers and viewers a monster from every perspective of the game. Sakiyama is the “everyday” psychotic. She is the extreme psycho that is also the underdog/running joke. As such, even if you recognize her hard work never really pays off big, you feel okay when she is defeated. It doesn’t turn anyone’s moral compass upside down and into a hater.
Plus, she’s constantly baked within a sense of ludicrousness. Air Master, for that matter, is wrapped with the same weirdness the whole time. Want to learn about meat eating? All that admiration and awe is not so serious at the end of the day.
Such distillation of awesome, amusement, and amazement needs evocation. Perhaps we invent a creative meme (i.e. GAR) just for things like this. Sadly though, I think that somewhat cheapens the process of working through the thoughts and reflecting on how and why awesome is what awesome does as these creations take on lives of their own, as terms like such spirals into dilution and meaninglessness, from one mind to another as each makes his own interpretation on it. Maybe we’re just reinventing wheels. At least I hope the exercise, futile it may be, is at least fun.
Ugh, com’on. L2R.
http://lelangir.dasaku.net/?p=1160
>>Well, uh, insofar as you call coburn going through 1339 words on his philosophy of GAR “meta nonsense”, it’s the same as calling 625 just-as-subjective-words nonsense. Discourse is discourse: “the process of working through the thoughts and reflecting” doesn’t discriminate against meta or non-meta, does it?
Actually I did this post meta nonsense, if you read paragraph 3. But dude, there’s more to my post than the meta nonsense you quoted–in fact, that’s just addressing one of the two major points in this post.
The meta narrative in my meta nonsensical post, if you care to read it, is in regards to the act of satisfying that need. Just saying Archer is GAR cheapens Archer. Meta discourse doesn’t cheapen Archer, but it isn’t the same as just talking about it in application. You can talk about GAR all you want in the meta but it doesn’t explain the subject matters that GAR refers to. The cheapness comes in when it becomes meta for meta’s sake.
That’s what I was referring to.
#1 talking about GAR != #2 talking about Archer is GAR != #3 talking about Archer.
You’re talking about #1 and I’m talking about #2 and #3. In as much as talking about things in the meta, it requires a root in the non meta in order to have traction with reality. Otherwise you’re engaging in social studies rather than anything actually meta re: anime/manga/whatever.