The Channel of Commerce Argument on Loli: Chu-Bra
Obscene?
Commercial pornography?
Fuel, fire, and moe morality?
I am not really interested in talking about the ongoing, recent and future legal actions of people who got into trouble from possession of child pornography, real or imagined. Despite the suspect motives behind both the prosecution and the legislative bodies, I think it stands as a practical matter, that if Gaiman can be arrested for what he owns, then we are in good company where fairness is also among us.
However in all the nonsense posturing about imaginary children or harm or lawfulness, one key indicator in all these situations is the nature of the works. After all, what is wrongful in the eyes of the public is sexualizing children or whatever that is obscene. The mediator mind in me says that there is a neutral ground between these seeming opposite positions. It seems to me that for a lolicon to get his rocks off, it isn’t a necessary requirement to have obscene material or material depicting minors in a sexual situation. Perhaps it doesn’t apply to all you sickos out there, but I think there’s room to cooperate.
And I think the key to that is doing it well. Here is one possible example.
The latest episode of Chu-Bra ended with a little “kero-chan check” style segment on garter belts. Except it’s an instructional video instead of a design tip zoom-in. (Hm, I think that would be great for a show like Chu-Bra…) Nayu models how to wear a garter belt with appropriate stockings and gives us tips on the right way to do it, and some advantages of the type of stocking that goes with the system.
That is well and good except that she models it by wearing it, while in her usual attire. And by usual attire I mean in her stereotypical, cutekawaii chu-bras andto chu-pantsu desu.
I think it’s particularly noteworthy that in the same episode, the story discusses the role of underwear in male-female relationship. I think it is a fair characterization that girls’ undies are fuel (as translated) for the imagination for guys. At the same time, I’m not sure if it is an appropriate characterization. When it comes down to it, women’s underwear is just pieces of fabric and like material; on the other hand, the human imagination can take unimaginably many different forms, and can be inspired by anything under the sun and more. It’s like Doc Brown’s fusion reactor on his DeLorean, to use a fuel analogy. It’s Rule 34.
To understand the full picture, Nayu-bro asks the key question–how does a girl feel when a guy sees her in her underwear? I don’t think it gets any simpler than that inquiry, that attempt to convey a “how do I feel when I’m in your shoes?” notion across the ever-so-mysterious gender line. And we can ask that to ourselves; it is a fair thing to ask regardless if you are a budding teenage girl or not. And while I suspect we will get different answers, the exercise is one of empathy and not of comparative criticism.
I wonder how far they’ll go with Hiroki though–I think he’s a pretty good guy, taking the high road. But then again I don’t think they have much of a choice. What I want to see from the story is how it drills down to his respect (yes, respect!) versus his emotional responses. Ultimately embarrassment is an emotional response, and it’s a signifier and a controllable impulse. Being able to deal with your feelings is part of what makes a man mature, right? From an education perspective, if they want to tell girls that guys blush when seeing girls in underwear, they’re doing it with a heavy hand.
Okay, enough Chu-Bra ranting: we know this is a late night anime, which is stereotypically filled with anime featuring a lot of fanservice (let’s assume “sexualized displays of female bodies” as I use the term fanservice for this purpose). It’s a very weak assumption in my mind, but one necessary for this discourse. Well, Chu-Bra manga is a part of Comic High!, home of Hitohira, Potemayo, and Kodomo no Jikan (big surprise there); it’s a seinen magazine, so the assumption holds to some degree.
It seems to me that the catch to Chu-Bra is to play with that befuddled boundary between “fuel” and “fodder.” By fodder I mean as in general, the purpose of fanservice is for arousal, and little else. In as such, increasing competition and sophistication in fanservice breeds increasing diversity for outlets for fanservice. (I am speaking to “mai brothas” here in that if you watched Kanokan not because it has fanservice, but because how it is done, yeah?) On the other hand, “fuel” can be used for constructive purposes. One logical progression is to make the fanservice actually meaningful, like “how can you have breast milk magic without breast milk and how can you have breast milk without breasts?” Or, “how can you have an underwear club without underwear”? You can obviously go too far even with that disguise of sorts, as in the case of Kodomo no Jikan. And the example up above with Nayu demonstrating those garter belt+stockings setup is pushing things! But that is an example of getting it on without getting it out of hand. Sort of.
To revisit the baseline, isn’t that what child porn is? You take normal pictures of naked children (perfectly okay in a non-predatory situation), and give it to people who are looking for porn? Is that really that different than what Chu-Bra (or KoJikan or any other kind of porn) is doing as far as functionally for the consumer? Isn’t the only difference a matter of subject of content? I suppose because underwear is not porn nor could they be classified as children, and children wearing underwear is generally not considered pornography…
We have to thank the Almighty for the power of human imagination in which we can turn anything into a turn-on. It is just a matter of context (or as I call it, a channel of commerce).
And it’s not just about porn. It’s also no different than why I (or any of you I imagine) would watch a totally shoujo show (eg., Card Captor Sakura?) or something outside of the typical, categorical, “target audience bubble.” When it’s done well, done in a way that I can appreciate, I will watch it and probably enjoy it! And by the same token, I imagine there could be some kind of material that pacifies the bulk of you naughty lolicons out there without totally offending any random passer-by. It is only limited by the ever-expanding barrier of human imagination.
PS. A trip down Danbooru-lane with the right tags will tell you that a lot of illustrators draw panties under garter belts! Maybe Chu-Bra will bring about some positive change, yeah?
Rally for the Anime Chara Grand Prix, 2010 Edition
Do you want to win a bunch of useless loot? You do? This is how you do it.
Unlike 2ch’s Saimoe or the International Saimoe League, the by-fan-for-fan Megatokyo Forums Anime Character Grand Prix has a March Madness-style loot pool as part of its allure. Now granted most people play it for fun only; the prizes are not serious business and you get a lot more out of it by seeing the creative campaigns people come up with, being it is a community event and not an all-internet invitational. The loot themselves are just your usual pile of new and used goods: R2 and R1 DVDs, CDs, figures, posters, doujinshi, artbooks, and other trinkets. It is also open to the international members, despite being an American-based operation.
To participate, simply make an account on the MT forums, make familiar of the forum rules, and head over to the AGP sub-forum and read the sticky threads, starting from the “forum rule” one and the “AGP rules” one. Once you figured out what’s going on (and if you have question you can ask by posting in one of the threads), read the bracketology thread and put in your guesses…
Yeah, there is a certain level of inaccessibility due to how involved most of the players are, and the games have been around for a while now (I think the first time we ran this was back in ‘00 or ‘01). But at the same time it would be great if more people would join in. If the loot is incentive, that is fine by me.
I wish I could show you what we had to give away, but it was really just a smorgasbord of random things that are related to anime in some way and I’m too lazy to dig out the pictures. I think I gave away a (new) copy of Nana Mizuki’s The Museum one time, and that was the farthest removed item from being directly an anime…thing that I gave away. Or was it some Masami Okui single? I don’t remember anymore. In years past, generally we give away a minimum of $100 USD worth of things. Certainly beats trying to sell them on my blog or on eBay as far as de-cluttering the house goes!
The loot pool entry period ends this week, so if that’s your thing, it’s time to take your pick as soon as you can.
How Has Anime Changed Over the Past 15 Years?
Ask John the same question, and you can read his answer.
It is a tough question to tackle, so I felt it was unfair to criticize him behind his back. Rather, I want to supplement his survey of the last 15 years of anime by pointing out some key changes that JP and I (mostly I) felt that was too important to be left out of John’s answer. There are also some erroneous bits, but I’m going to ignore them for now (ie., LOL moe and tsundere in anime predates 1995 kkthx).
Japan, now online: Between 1995 and 2010, cellular phone penetration has skyrocketed in Japan. If you recall Makoto Shinkai’s 5 cm/s, that was a key plot device in the first segment, especially coming into the film as a generation who find their cell phones second-nature. I presume this is how most modern Japanese teens and young adults feel about cell phones. Of course, Japan is this weird place where more people go online and do their internet stuff via cell phones than with their personal computers, so that also means places like 2ch is really a socially important thing today. Let’s not even go into how important 2ch is for anime fans of Japan. And 2ch didn’t officially exist until 1999.
The impact of 2ch on anime is hard to point and cite authoritatively, even if I’m sure we could cite to a bunch of stuff. It is, however, notable as a way for industry folks to gauge and interact with fans. Leaks to 2ch is almost like a marketing tool nowadays. (Kanatagatari’s leak is widely thought of as on purpose, for example.) We have anime and manga made about the Train Man story, which is essentially a national-cultural nod to 2ch. Obviously 2ch gets referenced in anime and manga, too. Still the real impact of 2ch has on anime is on the fans, on the fan industries (read: doujin market), and as a social hub that can make or break a work. Gurren Lagann episode 4 anyone?
And that’s just 2ch. Blogging; Mixi; online stream sites like Nico and Youtube, DTO sites, paid-streams, even the likes of Crunchyroll and foreign-operated licensees all play a notable role in the evolution of anime especially in the latter part of this decade. Pixiv and similar communities fostered growth of talents, even if only in part. It also presented a fan-facing revenue stream, complemented that whole “Comic Market” mentality that, well, we’ll get right to it.
Year In Review: N-Squared List
Just like last year, I guess some things have not changed. This could be a reference.
Seitokai no Ichizon And the Next Level
Let’s be more precise. Age and knowledge do not impart perspective. It is the hidden cost of outsourcing your code and planning your primary education curriculum mainly on an elevator system of rote memorization of data and formulas.
Which is to say, when Kurogane says however-many-years, he is just estimating some amount of accumulated experience. I imagine there are as many jokes shooting past above my head as the ones that hit, full on or glancing blows, coming from Seitokai no Ichizon. The same could be said that even I do not understand many of the jokes in Lucky Star, and I suspect (or rather, ani-nouto might have confirmed as much) that most of us enjoy Lucky Star despite our ignorance. Despite decades of anime watching, that is.
Seitokai no Ichizon plays without the fail safe that Lucky Star does (as with many others). A typical anime or manga comedy aims to pander wide, which is a matter of your sense of humor, I suppose. Sense of humor, though, is a finicky thing. When the joke can be appreciated both by a lower, commonly understood sense of humor as well as having multiple level of funniness to it, the joke may be more successful to a wider number of people. My personal measuring bar for this is Akitaro Daichi’s style, who masterfully combines in-jokes with just-plain-funny execution consistently. That is the fail safe.
(Contrast this also with Akiyuki Shinbo’s shotgun style, that lowers the significance and the transactional cost jokes so that even if the audience do not get many of them, it detracts little from the overall experience. It is a low risk, low probability but high reward gamble. Some might confuse that style with Seizon.)
But I am not sure that is what Seitokai no Ichizon is about. From the very beginning, it is a novel adaptation involving a bunch of people talking inside a room, diced up into short skits. There is an over-arching story, but at the same time the story telling style is almost non-linear as different plot threads weave into the back drop of a simple, episodic narrative. Maybe this is what is “healing,” and maybe this is Seizon’s true safety net. However, I think it is something that only works once you are sufficiently disarmed from laughing your butt off.
And yes, I enjoy Seizon because:
- I laughed my butts off.
- It is like reading the blog of a Japanese anime/manga/stuff fan.
There is a simple pleasure to see how some things just don’t change regardless of what language you speak and where you were born, too.
Well, so the question turns to: why are some people indifferent, despite having perhaps similar experience and knowledge with anime? The simple answer is that Author and I have very different sense of humor, maybe. Perhaps I get some jokes that he does not. Maybe I enjoy this kind of aimless 5-way manzai skit just because, and he doesn’t?I don’t know, as all or some of the above could be true. To some extent, I don’t really care either, because in the end something enjoyable was made into an anime, and even if I didn’t read the original works, it may very well preserved the spirit of the thing.
Chalk one up for further genre fine-line specification! Especially when it is a risky work that may very well be one of a kind.
Now I just need to come up with a better explanation other than to describe Seizon like reading an anime blog, since nobody knows what that means as applied to a work in of itself. Yes, one of the jokes about Seizon isn’t so much that the fourth wall has broken down, but the narrative is running naked down the street, out of the cage. In fact, it is as if Satoshi Kon was making an episode of Paranoia Agent about making Paranoia Agent. In Seizon the guise is much better, but as a result it’s much more difficult to pick up because the point isn’t so sharp. For starters, our four Student Council girls represent each of the four seasons, not just by name, but also by motif and personality flares. Their relationship with Sukisaki is not unlike the relationship of its intended audience with Seizon itself. Why the four seasons? Maybe they’re inspired by KEY games, I don’t know. Maybe Key-kun knows?
What I described in the above paragraph isn’t so much what is Seizon is about, but it is an example of the kind of thinking that underlies what makes Seizon enjoyable (and perhaps one could even say that is Seizon). A part of understanding is knowing the material it evokes, but ultimately it is a matter of perspective, and no amount of aging or anime watching can help you with that.
Changing gears complete, let’s ponder on something unusual. We might have a clue as to how nonsensical this was, in of itself. So how odd was it when someone whips up a blog that you saw from the show? Would it be even more weird if the blog was Out Of Character? Too bad they didn’t get that far, so in the end we just have a reference from the show made post-hoc on the web. Still, go take a look!
