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Boohoo
2011-09-07 19:28:09
I guess a spoiler warning is appropriate here for anyone who hasn't watched Clannad.
I was trying to avoid watching Clannad ~After Story~ since the first season disappointed me but I guess I couldn't resist the temptation afterall. The second season was deffinitely better but all the conservative worship of family values left me cold. The whole series (including the first season) is basically one big mental journey of the male protagonist to adapt his paternal role. This is why he is obsessively helping all the girls around him and later on, in the second season, his wife even has to die so that he could reunite with his daughter and fully play the role of the protective father. Conveniently he could also skip the first difficult baby years of his daughter (since he is reunited with her when she is 5) and ofcourse she's nothing like an irritating ADHD kid but an angelic child, easy to love and take care of. If you only add here the fact that Nagisa perfectly adopts her role as an obdient and selfless housewife then it's immediately clear why Clannad is just another conservative male fantasy.
It would have been easy to render the outcome totally different with some changes here and there. For example I'm thinking what the series would have been like if Tomoya had died instead of Nagisa. Instead of the usual story of a father reclaiming his paternal title we would have had a story of a struggling single mother. Or what if Nagisa hadn't died but after some time the two of them would have run into unsolvable relationship problems and divorced? Sigh, I guess the escapist fantasy of anime wouldn't allow such things. -
Looking good
2011-09-03 18:02:18
Okay this thread is a whole lot of fun:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=106413
So let's look at my current editing project in the light of this annoyances list. I deffinitely have at least these:
"[visual effects on] Piano keys"
Check. (although replace piano with synth)
"Constant shake (possibly combined with the song being all like RRrrraAAaAarRRRarraRARaRRARARRRARARARaararRAarRRRR)"
Check.
"Fading at every cut, especially hard beats"
Check.
"Fast white flashes"
Check.
"Cuts so fast that you can't tell what's happening"
Check.
"Over use of Black/White flashes to create "action""
Check.
Everyone's gonna love it! -
Avoiding editing..
2011-08-31 14:40:18
..is surely something I master pretty well. Just yesterday instead of editing I spent HOURS watching Nana, which is actually a pretty good series and does a pretty good job avoiding all the sexist traps usually found in romantic animes. Talking about sexism, I liked this essay:
http://www.ace.lu.se/images/Syd_och_sydostasienstudier/working_papers/shibata_final.pdf
But for now, a cup of coffee and a real attempt to get some editing done tonight! -
25% done...
2011-08-27 20:22:45
...which means I have about a minute of my AMV done. At least I know I can still do ultrasync!
But I felt like taking a quick look at Ef - A Tale of Melodies here since I watched it pretty recently. I gotta admit I liked the first season better because Melodies went totally wrong with the way it handled Yuko's character. She immediately falls under the pretty-girls-who-suffer category as a victim of domestic violence. Now I admit there's a moment of cleverness in the way she's depicted as bitter towards Yu because he "abandoned" her. It's obviously a case of misguided anger as the true ethical subject here was not Yu but ofcourse her abuser who she doesn't really seem to blame. Unfortunately the authors seemed to have got a little too caught up in this logic as well: neither Yu nor Yuko are never quite able to face the abuser and he always manages to patronize their attempts. The show is also suspiciously concerned about his own past and feelings, as if that somehow justified everything.
My problem with Yuko was that she's merely a good example of the worst reactionary nonsense in anime. She's rescued from her awful situation only to be later patronized by Yu, her heroic male protector. In the anime, right after she has run away with Yu, there's a moment when she doubts Yu's feelings towards her and he slaps her in the face to snap her out of it. Instead of going all "WTF is wrong with you?!" on Yu or at least slapping him back she instead regresses into a ridiculously stereotypical housewife character who knows her place as a cooking machine with a part time job. One is tempted interpret her death in the end as a blessing in disguise, to put her out of her misery. I mean, just c'mon, one just can't get away with all this even in anime!
Ef is also a pretty good example of egoistic romance dramas. In these dramas all the characters are endlessly troubled with their feelings for other people but the catch is they don't really seem to care about anything else than the authenticity of their own feelings. One should know that when you start pondering whether your feelings towards your friend are authentic or not you're not really friends. A true friend is selfless enough to not care about such things. -
Insert rant title here
2011-08-22 19:15:41
I wrote a long journal entry...but something went wrong and the whole thing got deleted ;_; Sigh, I had such a magnificent rant going! I'll sum it up to two paragraphs under the title of "Worst anime characters: case Czeslaw Meyer from Baccano!"
I just recently saw the whole series. Putting all the sadistic content aside, it's easy to spot one of the typical anime obscenities, which the series relied on despite of its originality. I'm talking ofcourse about Czes, the little boy character in the series, who is one of the "immortals" who posses the ability to regenerate their bodies from any wound. Apparently the authors of the series/manga absolutely felt the need to have the little boy tortured (he's really the person to go through all the most sadistic acts of the series as he was subjected to cruel experiments on his immortality). Ofcourse due to these experiences he has lost the ability to trust people, he also doubts himself and has an overwhelming sense of guilt of his actions. In the end he is remedied by his kind saviours and learns to trust people again etc. The series even has the whole procedure of Czes talking about how worthless he is so his newly made friends can go all sympathetic towards him. Ok, the series apparently has this sympathy for the beaten and the abused, so what about it?
The problem is ofcourse the obscene logic beneath this apparent empathy for the victims. It goes as follows: We're presented all kinds of abused innocent characters only in order for us, as the audience, to practice our sublime empathy on them, but always on the condition that the characters in question are "worthy" of our love. In other words they absolutely need to be pure and innocent with all these lovely selfless personality traits, with an overwhelming sense of guilt and so on. If this isn't patronizing and sadistic then I don't know what is. I'd really love to see an anime, which would have an abused character but with a totally different kind of personality resulting from this abuse. It's incidentally why I loved the film "Lilya 4-ever", which depicts an abused teenaged girl but with the twist that she's a total anti-social personality, bitchy and just plain irritating, but nevertheless we never have the right to judge her as she's merely reacting to her abuse. Despite of the escapist fantasy world that we always see in even the most "serious" animes, I think we need anime characters like this.
JOURNAL: Emong
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