Otaku Links: Hint hint

Otaku Links

11 years ago

Bakumatsu Rock, one of the shows I am reviewing for ANN, ended this week. I was more disappointed by the ending than by the show overall. I also wrote about Nobunaga Concerto 9 and a very Australian episode of Free!

Heroine Boys and Princely Girls: How “Nozaki-kun” is Challenging Gender Roles in Fiction. I just discovered the Josei Next Door and now my goal is to write reviews as thoughtful as hers.

It’s only mid September, but if you want to join the Reverse Thieves’ sixth annual anime Secret Santa, now’s the time. All you need to participate is an open mind for overlooked or undervalued shows.

Remember when the History Channel tweeted the events of the Titanic in real time last April? Now some ambitious soul is live-tweeting the One Year War, a fictional conflict that makes up the basis of the Gundam franchise.

These are the seven best lesbian anime series ever made. I wasn’t into Noir, but otherwise I’m inclined to agree.

There are still two spots open on the ultimate fujoshi tour of Japan: the 11-day BL Teafighter Tour. It gets its name from Teahouse and Starfighter, two of the Web’s most artfully drawn BL comic series.

Finally, as the summer season winds down and you find yourself in between series, I highly recommend taking a break to check out some manga. I can’t put down My Wife Is Wagatsuma-san, which I love for its hyperbolic humor and sympathetic portrayal of losers as the heroes of their own lives.

Screenshot via Free! Eternal Summer.

Reporting on subculture with empathy and understanding

Fandom, Journalism

11 years ago

I like to think of the Small Press Expo as one enormous Artist’s Alley. For a weekend, the Marriott Bethesda’s largest ballroom is devoted independent artists and publishers from all over North America. In 2010, I wrote this blog post about it. In 2011 and 2012, I wrote about it for the Daily Dot. Last year, I just bought stuff.

You have definitely heard of at least some of SPX’s exhibitors, but what I like best is to discover new cartoonists I’ve never heard of. Two years ago John and I first met Evan Dahm when I interviewed him; now we buy his latest graphic novel every year.

This year my favorite discovery wasn’t just one artist, but an entire collection of them. I bought SubCultures Comics Anthology after talking to its editor, Whit Taylor. Contributors shared 37 different stories about fan communities that edge on the bizarre, from Steampunks to cryptozoologists to Real Doll connoisseurs.

Each cartoonist had their own approach to the community they covered. The author of the Esperantists chapter methodically interviewed members. One cartoonist actually became a hostess at a Japanese bar to cover hostess culture, which I deeply appreciated having once become a maid to investigate maid cafes. There were many methods, but the most poignant chapters were the ones that portrayed the cartoonist’s empathy.

That’s why my least favorite chapter was the one that portrayed Juggalos, fans of the Insane Clown Posse, as lawless pre-criminals without speaking to any Juggalos themselves. Juggalos’ reputations precede them, but it gets really interesting when you talk to individuals about why they feel like outcasts everywhere but here.

My favorite was about Reborners, women who play with lifelike dolls. The chapter notes that while a prolonged adolescence is the accepted norm for men, “‘Play’ for adult women is still regarded as inappropriate and symptomatic of female pathology.” While outsiders find the realistic dolls creepy, community members embrace them to overcome stillbirth, infertility, or just as an escape from normal life.

I have frequently reiterated that Otaku Journalism is about empathizing with the community that is the subject of your reporting, instead of depicting it as a faceless Other. I strongly believe that being a member of a subculture personally can help reporters to reasonably depict similarly niche communities.

It’s natural to have an immediate visceral reaction to any subculture and assume it’s the weirdest thing ever. But covering it from that angle is the easy way out. I was at a Civil War reenactment some years back and I saw this in action:

“Have you noticed that the TV reporters here are only looking at the most beautiful and weirdest people they can find?” [the journalist] said. “I saw the Channel 7 guy interview the most gorgeous southern belle followed by the most scraggly bearded soldier.”

Empathic reporting doesn’t mean giving subcultures a free pass—GamerGate is a fresh example of why we can’t even let the fandoms we love off the hook. But it does mean giving members of the community a chance to tell their own stories before we write them off as just the latest weird thing to expose for the entertainment of mass media audiences.

Screenshot via American Juggalo

Otaku Links: Epic stuff

Otaku Links

11 years ago

In this beautiful short film, two Anime Expo attendees share why they cosplay.

The Amazing Life of Sean Smith, the Masterful Eve Gamer Slain in Libya. Mainstream media take note: often the most fitting eulogy doesn’t ignore the departed’s hobbies, especially when he’s a big name fan.

Fellow writer Colette Bennett wrote about why she’s leaving the fan convention scene for now.

Bobduh, my colleague at Anime News Network, wrote about why we take it so personally when somebody dislikes our favorite anime.

Dear Prudence, my 13-year-old reads pornographic fanfiction. Prudence is really understanding; my parents just grounded me.

It’s one thing to prevent kids from reading porn; it’s another thing for Canada to arrest a man for watching hentai on child porn charges. A decade ago, we had to convince people that not all anime is porn. Today, we need to convince people that not all anime porn (or even most of it) depicts minors.

Maybe the first step to fighting online harassment is actually caring about the kinds of communities we cultivate. League of Legends hired psychologists to study—and lessen—its pervasive culture of harassment.

Hope, my editor at Anime News Network, just released her first visual novel! It’s called Lovely Little Thieves, and you can play the demo for free.

Illustration via Ms. Marvel, found here.

Lessons learned from professional anime reviewing

Anime, Careers

11 years ago

Today marks the third week of my professional anime reviewing career. As you might have noticed, I’ve been reviewing Free!, Bakumatsu Rock, and Nobunaga Concerto every Wednesday on Anime News Network.

I hinted earlier that I’d share some lessons learned when I had them, and boy have they hit me like a ton of bricks in the last few weeks. Let’s take a look:

Practice makes perfect

I mentioned in my introduction that I’m not very experienced at reviewing, but I didn’t honestly think that meant I wasn’t any good. I’ve been getting paid to write for the majority of my 20s, and I guess I’ve kind of gotten a big head about it.

But I had to work hard to get my reviewing up to snuff. Did you know I had to rewrite my initial Free! Eternal Summer review THREE TIMES before it was ready to be published? Nobody likes a writer with an ego, so instead of balking I listened carefully to Zac and Jake’s suggestions and I haven’t made the same mistake twice.

It’s hard to learn a new skill in front of a huge new audience that doesn’t know a thing about you and isn’t likely to have any sympathy. That’s professional writing in a nutshell though. I’ve written down all of Zac and Jake’s suggestions in an effort to swim rather than sink.

You can be opinionated AND fair

When you look at the shows I’m watching, perhaps you notice a bit of “one of these things is not like the other.” It was kind of a long story how I ended up with two “manservice “shows and Nobunaga Concerto, the one show none of the other reviewers wanted to touch.

Nevertheless, I’m really happy to have gotten picked to review anime for ANN, so I gamely picked it up and watched 6 episodes in a day. I don’t like it very much, but I’m working hard to explain exactly what my problems were, as well as give it the points it deserves for things like the power ballad ending song and beautiful backdrops. You might think I’m hate-watching if I give something a D; but that’s boring. Readers can tell when you’re nitpicking. But if you can back up a bad review with clear examples, that makes your opinion more reasonable.

However, Nobunaga Concerto has a small but loyal fanbase, and they made their disagreement very apparent in the comments. Which brings me to the third lesson:

Context is everything

I don’t know much about Nobunaga. Like, at all. I did some Wikipedia reading before starting the show. So to me, it looked like the show was just throwing random plotlines and characters at me with very little notice or development. Fans said I had it all wrong.

Well, I’ve done some research and they’re basically right. Nobunaga and his friends are so extremely well-known among Sengoku Era history buffs as to be personality tropes by now. If you’ve played Sengoku Basara, watched Nobunaga the Fool, etc. you need no introduction.

It’s like saying “I don’t get it, they should explain this better!” every time Gundam Build Fighters parodies the original Gundam material it is based on. The whole point is that they’re throwing in Easter Eggs for the diehard fans.

This is why Zac wanted us to choose our own shows; so we could pick anime we already had the necessary context for reviewing. And that’s very likely what I’ll end up doing in the fall.

Of course I won’t be dropping Nobunaga in the meantime. But I’ve learned that nothing exists in a vacuum—entertainment is dependent on its source material. I hope I’ve made that abundantly clear in the reviews that I’m putting up from now on.

Screenshot via Nobunaga Concerto

Gunpla 101 Updates

Figures and Toys

11 years ago

There’s no good time to get sick, but Friday morning is probably one of the least opportune times to come down with something. Quarantined in my apartment, I made the best of it and made some serious updates to Gunpla 101.

So instead of a blog post here, have five new blog posts there:

Gunpla for Girls

“Gundam for girls” and “gunpla for girls” are two of my site’s top Google search terms. I want to let girls know that ALL gunpla is for them. Includes a pretty politically incorrect paragraph from Bandai about how women prefer dress-like suits to “stand out on the battlefield.” Um, that’s kind of the chain mail bikini argument for mobile suits!

How to Clean Your Gunpla

The best part about doing these site updates is getting my nails done for my close-up shots. As somebody who looks at a lot of gunpla tutorials myself, I think that properly manicured hands are something a lot of gunpla technicians overlook. And yes, I do use makeup brushes to clean my gunpla—they’re soft enough for skin, after all.

How to Fix Broken Gunpla

True fact: my earliest gunpla are mainly held together with superglue by this point. (Now I build Master Grades, proof that anyone can improve!) I’d been meaning to put SD Gundam Unicorn back together after he took a spill, and this blog finally gave me a chance to do it and document the process.

Gunpla Resource Spotlight: 2013 Gunpla Catalogue

This is sort of a shill but you would not believe how much fun we’ve been having with this catalogue. From the very first Gundam kit sold in 1980 to stuff from last year, it’s all photographed here, with an English title and a picture of the box art. Theoretically we could find any gunpla ever made, but I’ve just been drooling over the Perfect Grades…

Version Ka 101

This post came out of a question I asked John, which we then figured is a question a lot of people have: What are Ver. Ka models and what makes them different? In fact, they get their name from their designer, Hajime Katoki, who conceptualizes more stylized renditions of iconic gunpla designs.

We also updated the store. I think it’s more personal to include our own photographs of our favorite kits and tools, but we’re not even halfway done photographing our collection! I need to get my latest, cutest model, Beargguy San III in there; I spent a particularly congested Saturday putting the finishing touches on him.