Petra Szeman

various media I watched/read/etc over the past few months

12/11/2024

An incomplete roundup of the various media I watched/read/etc over the past few months !

ANIME ANIME ANIME ANIME ANIME ANIME ANIME

The Day I Became God / Kamisama ni natta hi 神様になった日

One of my goals this year has been to get through a lot of Maeda Jun’s work (also the writer of Air), because so much of his stuff has had a profound influence on me and I wanted to explore more of his breadth. Maeda’s usual domain is games, but he also worked on three original anime, this being the third one.

The initial mystery of Hina apparently becoming an omniscient god was great, and the comedy of the first half was fun to go along with, but this whole things really fell to pieces in the resolution for me. I’ve seen some theorising that Maeda’s own health issues/hospitalisation may have fed into how the story played out, but it just didn’t add up together in the context of end-of-series Hina and Yota for me.

Kinda shocked there was no fictional band as a central plot point in this one. The music was great as always though, and I particularly love the ending ’Goodbye seven seas’, the bit after the key change:
生きるだけで大変で
後悔だけが山積みだ
ゲームみたいにリセットで
はじめからやり直せたら

Charlotte

Continuing with the Key theme, this is Maeda Jun’s second anime. It follows the protagonist who has oddly specific special abilities (can transfer his consciousness into others’ bodies but only for 5 seconds), who gets flagged up by a group of similar teens for misusing his abilities, and forced to transfer into a school for people like them.

I read somewhere that the idea for Charlotte was to take all sorts of bits that worked in Angel Beats! and refine them for a more streamlined experience, but tbh I thought actually it had a bit too much in it, more so than Angel Beats? The cast was smaller, but the scale of the happenings reached a lot wider, and because of the episode count limit I thought it was way too condensed. Zhiend came and went, the end bit came and went, it really could’ve gone for twice as long imo. I found it hilarous though that when the protagonist runs away to a place he feels like is super far and at the end of world he actually ends up in Toride lol.

Things that stayed with me: Nao talking about her dream of making a music video for Zhiend songs, and how when she listens to them she sees herself in a vast landscape of fields with wind blowing through the grass. As someone who latches onto elements of music when figuring out video visuals, it felt v close to home, and the expanding fields as a sort of non-place or in between place that one is transported to echoes the qualities of what I call „the place without coordinates”, a sort of undefined „somewhere not here”. Actually I’ve been reading a book called Fiction as method, and the introduction refers to Null Island as a fiction that is at the centre of the world, and that’s kind of there too.

Putting in the opening because I love it. Also must mention that Charlotte is entry no.3 in the Maeda Jun works I’ve seen where a fictional band is central to the plot.

Horimiya

I watched this in the background while knitting mostly, picking it up because I saw people on twitter talking about it. It was nice, but a bit boring, because every discordance was basically immediately resolved within the episode; all the couples you thought would get together got together, all the bullies realised their wrongful ways and became good people, etc etc.

Maybe a bit too wholesome! It wasn’t bad or anything though.

The colors within / Kimi no iroきみの色

Apparently this is coming out in the UK in January 2025? I watched it in the summer while in Japan. I had a great time with this film. It was really gay! Also maybe I have a thing for media with bands in it.

As I watched it, I had a very strong sense that I was watching it from a very different context than the average Japanese audience, having grown up in a a primarily christian country (the setting for the film is a religious (catholic?) school in Japan) where the religion carries different connotations. That was a super interesting experience. I’m excited to see what the director will do next, as I love her work.

Robotics;notes

I started watching this on the ferry to Tanegashima, the island where it takes place, that I was visiting in the spring for a research trip because it’s also where 5 Centimetres Per Second takes place. I loved elements of this! I didn’t like the how it unfolded in the end, but until then, I loved the mystery of Airi and looking for the fragments of the Kimijima reports across the island. The ending song is perfect.

Skullface Bookseller Honda-san

This is my favourite comedy of the year I think. It’s funny!

The voice actor cast is actually insane! Hits close to home because I read a lot! I love how every character has a strange mask and that becomes their identity. Each episode is only 10 min, I highly recommend for a fun and slightly meta time.

Hibike! Euphonium season 3

I watched the final season of Hibike! Euphonium as it was coming out – those who are familiar with my work may recall that it actually even gets mentioned by name in one of my videos.

I had interesting conversations earlier in the year with Paul Ocone while in Japan, particularly concerning the queerness in Eupho, and I’m kind of angered that S3 went how I thought it would, with the queerbaiting ending in a very ’baiting’ category, which I’m honestly quite sick of from the Kyoto Animation. And I’m a queer that has been baited many a time !! But it’s just disheartening to see how much of the Kyoani works hinge majorly on queerbaiting elements, and they rarely if ever pull through.

That aside – the bits of S3 I didn’t like were the parts of it that signalled that Eupho was coming to an end, and I didn’t want it to end, so I loved it, but also hated it, at the same this. This hate is from the heart though, because I didn’t want to see anyone leave, I didn’t want Kumiko to pass on Asuka’s song to others, I didn’t want to meet new members, I didn’t want them to graduate. Which is to say I loved it.

There was shockingly little music in the early episodes, but also it made sense because of the shifting focus from the music to music+life, the life part getting larger and more threatening as one approaches graduation from high school.

My criticism aside from the queerbaiting is that I wish Reina went through actual character growth – I wish she failed at points of the season and had to learn from it. Oh well. It’s still weird to think how this is the end of Eupho.

MANGA MANGA MANGA MANGA MANGA MANGA

Golden Kamuy

I’m midway through a reread of Golden Kamuy, in Japanese for the first time, bc the last time I read it 4ish years ago my language ability wasn’t good enough yet. It’s one of my most favourite manga ever, as a perfect combination of intense action, harrowing themes and beautiful camaraderie.

It follows a wandering soldier traumatised by the Russo-Japanese war, and a native Ainu girl who team up to track down stolen gold with a complex history.

Please read Golden Kamuy, I don’t know what else to say. It’s grim, it’s hilarious, it’s fun, it’s heartbreaking.

BOoks BOoks BOoks BOoks BOoks BOoks BOoks

Kawakami Mieko: Heaven

I wanted to read another Kawakami Mieko novel after reading Kiiroi ie (Sisters in yellow) last year and loving it, but Heaven just didn’t deliver for me. I got really tired of it about halfway through and it took a lot of effort to finish.

I think my main issue was with Kojima’s behaviour, how she kind of edges on manic pixie dream girl-esque territories in the beginning, but then refuses to engage with anything outside of her belief system, and then turns into more of a piece of symbolism than a real character? For me at least. Sisters in yellow was awesome though, and I think the english translation is coming out soon as well.

Re:member

Re:member is the companion book to the game/anime Idolish7 that tells the detailed backstory of Re:vale in both its old and new forms.

I read the companion manga that covers the same content many times, but the novel was a great expansion to that. I particularly loved the bits focusing on Momo’s internal struggle and self-hatred upon joining Re:vale, and his deep disdain for himself when he catches himself in a moment of happiness.

It’s the most delicious internal turmoil! I feel like this is what marks the strength of Tsushimi Bunta, the writer, for me – it’s the plotlines involving deep self-hatred that hit the hardest.

The voices of a distant star / Hoshi no koe ほしのこえ

This is a book based on the short film by Shinkai Makoto of the same title, which btw I also screened for my students earlier this semester. It’s a story of a young boy and girl after the girl gets chosen to be sent off to space to fight a myterious alien race called the Tarsians. They keep in touch via text messages, but with the distance between them growing larger and larger due to space travel and warp jumps, the time it takes for the messages to arrive grows too, eventually throwing their timelines out of sync.

I got a lot out of the book – the film is only 20 minutes, so there’s a lot of extra detail in the pages, and I understood the characters a lot more as people. My favourite part in when the heroine Mikako comes into contact with a Tarsian and sees visions of her younger and older selves standing on two sides of a railtrack, separated by a cargo train running across.

Even Holm: Termush

A lot of my reading this year has been in Japanese, kind of a side effect of not living in Japan full-time and trying to upkeep my language capabilities.

To break with the habit a little I picked up this book, apparently a Danish scifi classic from the 60s that I was recommended by a friend.

It was unnerving and fun! It’s very short. I wish it went on longer. As the book proceeds, more and more of the prose unravels and looses its grip on reality.

James S. A. Corey: The Expanse

I’ve been listening to the audiobooks of The Expanse series for ages, it’s seemingly infitie. I’m currently in book 6, Babylon’s Ashes. I love it all, but I particularly enjoyed book 5, Nemesis Games, as it was the first time I think that members of the core gang aside from Holden got narrator roles, and it was thrilling to see them on separate journeys before eventually coming together again. Also the scale of disaster is massive in that one !!

GAMES GAMES GAMES GAMES GAMES GAMES GAMES

Idolish7 part 4

I finally played through/read Part 4 of the visual novel part of Idolish7, a game and subsequent anime I have a very normal and measured relationship with. Idolish7 largely follows the eponymous idol group with its seven members, as well as 3 additional smaller groups.

Each part of the story focuses on different things, there’s 6 in total so far. The anime adaptation with its 3 seasons covers the first three parts. The pacing of Part 4 was a bit unsteady for me, especially in the second half, but there were loads of elements I loved.

As always, there’s tons that was genuinely traumatising and heartbreaking that I’m absolutely not ready to see animated when the anime gets to them, and lots of performances and funny bits that I can’t wait to see move. It’s really the intensity of the drama that drives Idolish7 forward, but after the initial crisis is cleared up the pacing becomes a bit strange.
I’ll take a break now before moving onto part 5.

Dragon Quest XI

I started playing this game in 2020 – don’t laugh at me. I’m a very slow gamer, it’s hard for me to find the time, and especially with something so lore-heavy it took me forever to set up a schedule that was realistic to maintain but I also didn’t forget what the plot was between each playthrough. I got back into it earlier in the year and reached a sort of halfway point in the story at which stage the protagonist turns into a fucking fish, which I was so dismayed by that I put the game down for 6 months lol. I eventually picked it back up in the summer and really got into it – I loved the second half of this game!

The story of Gureigu and Homeros (Hendrik and Jasper in the English) was heartbreaking, I loved it. Peak doomed [redacted]. Not ready to use the y-word on my professional website. My only problem is that after completion, the post-game content (including time-travel malarky) feels very much like main game content, so I feel the urge to complete, and I went through lots of the post-game bits to the point where I’m not at the Final Final (?) Boss, but I got destroyed so thoroughly that I think I need to grind a lot to be able to rise up to the challenge. I’m not sure if I have that in me, but I also want to be able to resolve the story in the new way that the post-game offers !! Hurrr.

Air

I did a full replay of the visual novel Air (2000), doing all the routes for the first time. I got into Air via the anime adaptation when I was 13ish, and I still think it’s one of my most favourite pieces of media/art ever.

I love the escalating fantasy elements woven into the melancholy of life and trauma in a small seaside town, and all this against the backdrop of a monumental curse + mythology of the winged ones spanning a thousand years. Misuzu breaking down because the vastness of the accumulated memories of all the winged ones before her are too monumental for her human body to hold resonated with so much of my thoughts about the human perceptual system and longing for something that’s outside of its boundaries...

I also really enjoyed all the routes of the game – maybe Minagi’s the most (aside from the true route). No need to say that the soundtrack is of course phenomenal.

I’m going to stop here because this is already too long.

My plans for 2025 media:
🌟 Play more Key visual novels, esp. Maeda Jun
🌟 Play non-Key visual novels!
🌟 Play Star Ocean 6 (my partner worked on it!)
🌟 Go to the cinema more
🌟 Read more books in Hungarian
🌟 Read The brothers Karamazov

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QUAD Residency Report

7/11/2024

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Earlier this week I spent a couple of days in Derby, doing a mini residency at QUAD as I have been selected as their Digital Participation Artist (?)! It’s actually my first time ever doing a residency, which is possibly a bit surprising considering that I have been active as an ~artiste~ for a number of years now.

I got given access to a studio, and basically spent most of my time holed up in there, moving between my laptop and my tablet and my sketchbook, mostly trying to plot out the details for the upcoming show I shall do at QUAD, opening late September 2024. I’ll be in what they call “extra gallery spaces”, which are basically strange inbetween spaces spread across the building, so figuring out the setup in quite fun/challenging.

Because the spaces can be thought of as running in a line as you walk through the building, and because I’ve been thinking about narrative structures again, I’m leaning towards revisiting the ‘monomyth’ (hero’s journey) setup in the exhibition and making bits of new work to reflect on that mechanic. I say revisit, bc I already structured a major body of video work around the hero’s journey, the Monomyth: gaiden series I worked on between 2018-2022. I can’t fully trace the thought process back right now, but at some point I had a vision that I need to look at the structure MORE, or at least differently, maybe because the Monomyth: gaiden series was more about the subject (the hero) as they go through the journey across the multiplanar worlds/cosmos, but I yearn for the abstraction of the structure itself, AND I could title in Shin Monomyth !!! Like the Shin Godzilla etc films. It also brings me back a bit to the Youtube video that’s titled something like ‘Maeda Jun’s monomyth’, which I only half-watched bc it’s less abstract and more an analysis of Key’s narrative setups/the nakige 泣きゲー (crying games) formula, but I nonetheless think about it, because I’ve been mulling over Maeda Jun’s works for a good while now, and making an effort the slowly work through his repertoire. And I kind of want to grasp the monomyth in a way that connects to what I feel at the core of Maeda’s works, but this is a connection that’s not concrete enough yet to put into words, though it is a bit like that sudden moment in Charlotte when Tomori Nao talks about how listening to Zhiend makes places her up against the sublime (my reading), and thus she wants to get into MV editing. (Digital editing !!!!!! Something about porous materials, flowing between different screens, slicing into the world….)

In any case, this is the vague idea, and during the residency I sketched out segments of it, mostly the beginning (‘Departure/Call to Adventure’), because as always I’m uncertain where I will end up.

For the project at QUAD I also came up with an idea for a workshop about maps of different worlds and games, loosely based on the various diagrams I have drawn in my sketchbook (example in pic below) over the past few years, trying to pin down the topologies of multiplanar-realities, ie. how you may draw a map for a place that exists across multiple dimensions at once (like an anime pilgrimage location, both on the map in the real worlds but also in the world of the anime), or a place that is at multiple different coordinates at once (like a fictional town that is built up of segments of different IRL places, for example the town in Air that is a patchwork of very different IRL points across Honshu).

The idea is to start the workshop with an exercise building on this, then use the maps made this way as a basis for an interactive little game, using the phone-based game making tool of Downpour, where you can very simply make clickable game screens using photos and text and digital pics. There will be more of these taking place in September too, around the show’s opening.

Other Derby explorations included Otaku World, the local anime/weeb shop, which actually had some rare and unexpected stuff in stock; also I learnt from QUAD that they are involved in organising screenings and various other cultural activities, which seems awesome. I bought a small item to support them. I was also impressed they had a Spoon 2di magazine from 2018 in stock, seemingly random, and it had an Idolish7 tokushuu, parts of which I read - some bits of an interview with Abe Atsushi, where rather serendipitously he talks about the song Maybe (a solo song for his character Osaka Sougo) that I happen to have been obsessing over in recent weeks. I nearly bought it, but couldn’t quite bring myself to buy it at the price of 34 pounds, even though it may actually be a rare back number……… (Also covered Banana Fish! Which I happen to be reading atm! So many coincidences.)

Otherwise I ate lots of nice food, and went for a long walk along the river in the one sunny evening I had. Every decent city must have a river in it, otherwise it doesn’t feel real.

Lastly, this excellent pic I took at the Museum of Making - my artistic practice should come with a “beware of trains” warning too….

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things I watched/read/played in January

2/6/2024

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For my records and reflection!

films

Blue Giant (2023)

A story about a young person moving to Tokyo, ready to become the 'world's best jazz player' through sheer dedication and will. Alliences and friendships form, life keeps happening.

This came out last year while I was in Japan, but I completely missed it. In early January a cinema in Shinjuku was doing revival screenings of a bunch of films and I managed to catch it as part of that programme. It was a special sound set-up (ライブ音響上映) to make the soundscape particularly 'living' and impactful, which deliver so well in the music scenes. I was really touched by the story, I quite love intense and straight (?まっすぐ）characters like Dai; and the music had a huge impact on me, and I'm not even a particular lover of jazz even. Talking about the film with my partner after, he mentioned how entertained he was with the experimentalness of the music scenes, ie. trying to visually depict the intensity of the music beyond the sound itself, and conversely I said I kind of wish those bits were more experimental and wilder. I added the soundtrack to my music library.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023)

You see I quite like The Hunger Games, I read the books many times with great enthusiasm, and I think the film adaptations of the original trilogy was actually rather successful. I have not read the book that's the basis for this because I don't particularly care for Coriolanus Snow, but a film is way lower effort so I went for it, and there was way more singing than I expected. ??? My ultimate review is that I think they should have been braver and made it into an full-blown ridiculous musical, then the songs could've had actual impact instead of feeling a bit cringé. (But as we know akinek nem crinege ne vegye magára, so who am I to say.) Also, in his Peacekeeper era outfits Snow just looked like some lad you would come across in JD Sports, which was jarring. Confusion. Some rowdy teens in the cinema screening were taking photos of the screen when he showed up, with the flash on.

時をかける少女/ The girl who leapt through time (2006)

High school girl accidentally gains the power to time travel by leaping forward.

It's kind of shameful that I'm so late to the party, but I obviously really liked this. I loved how low-stakes the time travel was, which kept the story within a very graspable scope, and the bonds between the characters felt real. Also, in terms of resolution, I love a good timeline discrepancy. The relative simplicity of the backgrounds and the flatness of the character art created a nice atmosphere. I actually watched this from a DVD set I found for 1000yen in BookOff earlier in the month, and it came with a booklet of some background paintings + two DVDs with extra content such as storyboards and behind the scenes footage. The bit where you can see the character literally fly through time - this is sort of a tangent, but obviously time itself, especially when outside of linear time, is something that is one of those ungraspable things and I always find it interesting how people choose to represent it. It's a similar undertaking and wanting to depict cyberspace while retaining a sense of ALL of its possible iterations. The director Hosoda Mamoru seems to attempt to do something of this sort in all of his films - it being Time here, then Cyberspace in Summer Wars and Belle, or the Dreamspace in Mirai no mirai. Two thoughts here: 1. I always find it interesting that Hosoda depicts these on a white or generally light surface. So much media defaults to black to exemplify vastness, but the white literally lightens the mood, but also, it's the absolute presence of all colours, right? So it can tie in well with the positive approach that Hosoda takes to collaborative creativity in relation to these spaces. 2. I kind of find that these stories fall apart the more you try to accurately represent the ungraspable that is at the core of them. Like I haven't seen this done in a way that felt satisfying, and because Hosoda doesn't really add in perceptual ruptures to these spaces they kind of deflate amidst that smoothness. But also, I find it lovely that he challenges this same core with most of his films (though I didn't like Belle in particular). I'm looking forward to watching the background material DVDs.

anime and Tv shows

I don't really watch live action TV shows these days but shockingly this month I did!

消えた初恋　Kieta hatsukoi/ Vanishing my first love (2021)

Because of the heavy involvement of a borrowed eraser and the confusion that brings about, an unlikely crush forms between certain people. I'm not sure how to sum it up better. Love in unexpected directions, and working through the details of that through high school life?

Maybe this is my first time ever watching a Japanese dorama?! I binge-watched it on a whim, after rereading the original manga it's based on for the third time, and reading a bunch of fanfiction and still not getting enough of a hit. Sometimes the yearning just comes upon one.......
Great fun! Over the top! I was discussing Kieta hatsukoi on my ~secret~ fandom twitter account with an online pal, and we talked about how it's a pity there's no anime adaptation of this, because the source material would lend itself particularly well for the pacing and distortion anime allows for. The dorama is neat, and Michieda Shunsuke conveyed Aoki's ridiculous faces pretty well I think. (Upon googling to confirm his name, the automatic Hungarian translation of his wikipedia page showed 'idol group' translated as 'bálványcsoport'?なんか微妙) Ida's casting was a bit too cool, but when smiling he had the same sense of mischief as the character. Actually I though Aida was super well cast. Learning that the lead actors are in Johnny's groups made me feel a bit 🥴 in the light of recent news. HOWEVER, I just discovered that they're doing a thai drama remake of this?! Cannae wait !! I wonder if Ida will continue to have a shibainu or if they will localise the setting?! I urge everyone who likes school rom-com to read the manga btw.

ダンジョン飯 Dungeon Meshi/ Delicious in Dungeon (2024 ongoing)

They are eating things in a dungeon. I love the idea of a world descending downwards......... I love the range of characters. Would die for Senshi. I suspect I will keep watching this, and/or read the original manga.

30歳まで童貞だと魔法使いになれるらしい/ Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! (2024 ongoing)

Your average awkward salaryman Adachi turns 30, and discovers that the urban legend of doing that while still a virgin grants one magical powers is indeed true. He becomes able to hear people's thoughts upon touch - and soon enough discovers that the extremely handsome seemingly perfect Kurosawa in his office has a wild crush on him. Hilarity ensues. Love is real.

I had a friend invite me to the 応援上映 of the recent film instalment of this series last year, and in preparation I thought "sure yes I will read a volume of two of the manga it's based on", which ended up with me binge-reading the first 9 volumes or w/e over a weekend, and I've been following the story since. It's hilarious! It's great! The author actively talks about real gay people's lives in Japan (as opposed to the majority of BL authors who don't). Kurosawa is such a good mix of ikemen and cringé that it's abolsute chef's kiss. I think about his internal poetry and the line 'take a picture及びtake a video' a lot. It's exciting for this to get an anime adaptation! So far it's great fun, though they all have very intense eyelashes. On a sidenote, I find the opening super interesting, and the choice to have Adachi disintegrating into birds has such strong early 00s vibes, as well as the limited the colour palette and the music as well. I wonder what sort of decisions led to that. PS: the side character Tsuge in the early days looks exactly, and I mean EXACTLY like my partner. It's hilarious to see him animated because even the colour of the jeans and the turtleneck matches perfectly. It's a pity that later on Tsuge get a more fashionable haircut and moves away from his turtleneck life!! Smh.

葬送のフリーレン/Frieren: beyond journey's end (2023 ongoing)

I've only watched the first episode of this, but really enjoyed the premise. The story starts as a party of adventurers return after defeating Evil or something like that, and eventually part ways. Through having different paces of lives and lifespans, the elf member of the group Frieren starts getting a sense of just how short human lives are after witnessing his human friends age and die. She decided that she will work towards making stronger connections with humans.

I mean I don't have a lot to say other than it looking interesting, the soundscapes being beautiful, and the sheer shock I experienced when the end credits rolled and the whole format was a fucking Angel Beats! reference. !!!!!!???????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wow??????????!!!!!!!!! What else can I do but place exclamation marks???????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please watch Angel Beats! everyone.

16bit sensation - another layer (2023)

Bishoujo otaku game artist longs for the old golden days - she ends up accidentally timetraveling by opening up game boxes. I started watching it last year, and wrapped it up early January (only 13 episodes).

I started watching this because I love meta-stories, then stayed partially out of obligation + a love for Abe Atsushi, the voice actor for the male lead, THEN I stayed because of the sekai-kei twist from ep8 onwards. I have more thoughts about this but I'm tired of writing this blog post and want to stop. One thing I considered for quite a while is the role of deus ex machina in resolving sekai-kei world setups, and I thought that it was used quite satisfyingly here, and generally that contributed to the bishoujo game atmosphere being retained well throughout. It made me want to play more of the old classics. I also loved the alternate reality in which the bishoujo-boom was TOO intense and got swept up by America and the visuals became like extreme American comics vibes?! It was so funny. Despite coming a bit short in some regards for me, it was obviously filled with love for an era and I loved seeing that.

MISC

Idolish7 Good 4 You tour, Makuhari daytime + evening performances (2023-2024)

They did livestreams of the last two performances of the G4Y (yes) hologram live tour, so I obviously watched those as they were happening. I loved seeing the 2023 Black or White event songs with their stage choreos, and also it was nice to think back to the phenomenal time I had seeing the tour live when they were starting out in Tokyo in August. (I actually saw it twice in a row, on the same day, within 24 hours of landing in Japan. What a way to overcome jetlag !!! I had such a good time I cried.)
I love everyone, but Re:vale are unbeatable. The choreo for Hoshikuzu magic was really beautifully done. This is not the time and space to talk about the Idolish7 franchise, but I generally beg everyone to give it a chance. It's beyond brilliant, and has such depth and darkness lol.

Games

I'm getting tired now so I'm going to write arbitrary lists down here and maybe expand on them later.
This month I played:

a lot of Dragon Quest XI on the plane from Japan to the UK, but I kind of got dispirited at the big midway (?) twist so I haven't returned to it since. I will though bc I hate leaving things unfinished.
played/read the Idolish7 Jinrou/werewolf special story in the visual novel segment of the game
I kept on top of daily quests and rewards in both Idolish7 and Heaven Burns Red
I restarted playing Ghost of Tsushima, and I'm having a great time with it! progressing well with it, and taking lots of notes on places to film in there later

things i've read

I'm pretty sure my reread of Kieta hatsukoi was this month
new volume of Cherry Maho
accidental binge read of Sahara-sensei and Toki-kun (don't come at me for this)
I finished reading Slam Dunk which was PHENOMENAL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm reading ある男 from Hirano Keiichirou. I'm having a good time with it - v curious how they adapted this to film bc so much of it is just Kido sitting in a room and thinking.
I read a number of essays from Mechademia
new volume of Minatoshouji Coin Laundry (is the english title of this REALLY "Wash my heart"?)
new volume of Dai dark (from the author of Dorohedoro)
still continueing my Dorohedoro reread
vol1 of Dogs Red/Dogsled (??? how is it romanised), the new ice-hockey manga from the author of Golden Kamuy
update chapters for Sasaki to Miyano
update chapter for Hirano to Kagiura (spinoff of the above), which was only 8 pages, the last update was in august, and the next one is in april............ I am simply going to die

This is me outing myself as a lover of romance.

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could queerness have saved shinji? why do the idols get to sing of imagination?

1/19/2024

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I can't quite remember where, but I was reading an essay about Evangelion - maybe it was specifically about End of Evangelion, I wonder. It may have been in a Eureka volume. Anyway, I was reading it, and it made me think that I've never quite encountered the sort of Evangelion analysis that pleased me, because so many of them, like the one I was reading in that moment, fall back to the ultimate conclusion that Shinji has to accept that maturity and "growing up" are inevitable. That Evangelion is (at least in part) a critique of the socially inept otaku crowds, who refuse to give up their embarassing hobbies and integrate into society like a normal person. The director Anno Hideaki has spoken about the toxicity apparent in otaku subcultures, while being otaku himself. And I mean, that criticism is necessary AND it is very possible to read Evangelion along this "rejection of maturity" dynamic, as a sort of self-deprecating 'fuck you' move to the otaku audience. Considering how utterly depressing the ending is, it leaves us in a space in which the only option is to continue to live in a desolate and hostile space with no hopes for salvation. I put "growing up" and "maturity" in these readings in quotation marks, because all these readings ever describe is a supposed inevitability of getting your shit together and joining in in reproductive heteropatriarchy - the guy gets a job, contributes to the economy, fucks the girl who becomes a good wife, they make babies, and only ever engage with otaku materials from a place of shame.

Considering that Gainax was born out of an animated (lol) conversation at an otaku convention, I think the underlying position has to be that of a shared creative drive, an intensity in the level of engagement that is offputting so as to warrant the otaku label. And this is fun, and sustainable on a small scale, until maybe it gets too big, and too intense, and then maybe there's also self-hatred inolved, and with time the pressure to participate in reproductive heteropatriarchy rises, and it becomes unbearable, and THAT's where End of Evangelion leaves us.

I mean, Shinji is pathetic, and so depressed, but maybe the only point at which he didn't want to off himself was when he connected with Kaworu. And maybe the feelings in that moment overlap with those of the young Anno during those initial conversations that lead to the establishment of Gainax - that you can meet someone, and intensify eachother, and create, ultimately together. And that this can be enough.

Under reproductive heteropatriarchy, this can never be enough. And I don't want to impose anything on or assume anything about Anno, but I really think, that maybe Shinji would've have wanted to end it all if the option of a queer dynamic could've ever occured to him - because when queerness is present, the "growing up" and the "maturity" elements get twisted and reworked, and that's the point of it all. End of Evangelion says that you can create and hope but it will be futile - destruction follows. If you introduce queerness to the dynamic though, the destruction is carried out before the futility ever gets to set in. That destruction is a productive one, and it offsets the scale by queering antisociality. Then you end up in a place where otaku can be rethought radically.

I came to to think about this as I was listening to the song Pieces of the World from the Idolish7 Beyond the Period film from last year. The song is a sort of overview of the grandiosity of the universe itself (yes), and the smallness of the singular human against that backdrop. This is basically End of Evangelion, the same conundrum that was resolved in there by someone by trying to render every human into cosmic goo so our consciousness can break through its perceptual boundaries. Obviously, this doesn't come up in the idol song. Then, I suddenly asked myself: why is it that the idols get to sing of imagination (あらゆる屈託を / 壊して創造をしたい) in the face of futility (灰の下の文明どんな歌があった / 声も夢も消えて追想に), when all that's left for Shinji to do is stare at the terrible red of the skyline?

Maybe the queer position (=the position in which you can destroy, imagine and reorder) is available to Idolish7 because they are temporarily removed from reproductive heteropatriarchy through the status of "idols", as in, the idol is not even a human but a dream - and that reworking of the human is very similar to how queerness reworks the world on the whole. (I could also add something about the queernes at large within the Idolish7 franchise, but maybe this is not the place and time-)

Not sure what the conclusion is here. Maybe it's that Shinji should've taken up singing and dance. Maybe it's that indeed, I get annoyed reading analyses of Evangelion where I can see the author shaking his head like "maturity is inevitable and otaku have to accept it", because the adult life they refer to is never the same as mine, because it's reductive, and because I beg that they consider the existence of someone who is god forbid not a cis straight guy. But anyway. I think if Shinji was allowed to be queer, maybe the sky he looks up at the end would have been blue.

世界で一番永遠に近い
青い青い空の果ての太陽