Otaku Links: Robo glitter

Otaku Links

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I didn’t expect the prettiest anime of Winter 2015 to be a mecha anime, but life is full of surprises. Circumstances outside my control led to this not being such a great week for blogging, but the Internet was as lively as ever.

  • If you weren’t at Katsucon, BeatDownBoogie’s video is a good cross section of the fabulous cosplay that was on display.
  • I’ve seen a lot of t-shirts depicting anime, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone make an animation for a t-shirt. Anime-inspired apparel artist Boomslank is promoting their latest design with its own video. Here’s my own review of a Boomslank shirt.
  • Heard the one about the guy cosplaying Satan who runs into nuns in the hotel elevator? Anime anthropologist Charles Dunbar traced this popular piece of con lore back to the ’80s. This is an old article worth rereading about the oral tradition of anime conventions.

Otaku Links: Two short weeks

Otaku Links

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Between my San Francisco work trip, Katsucon, and the inevitable crushing sickness that followed, I haven’t spent a lot of time looking for links. Here’s just a little bit of Internet to start off your weekend:

  • My friend Katriel has been promoting The Anime Encyclopedia, Revised 3rd Edition, for the better part of a year and it’s finally up for order! Twenty dollars for an ebook (nevermind $80 for a book) sounds steep, but you have to understand just how thorough this is. I received an early copy and kept control+F searching the document for the most obscure anime I could think of—and every single one was in there.
  • After emailing my friend Kailer repeatedly for help on kanji readings, she showed me Jisho’s ultra-handy bookmarklet. Simply drag the link to your bookmark menu. Now, any time you see a Japanese word you don’t recognize, highlight it in your browser and click the link. Boom! Instant assistance!
  • One thing I’ve been watching while recovering from this cold is Great Teacher Onizuka. This 1999 classic is a product of its time, with clunky art and recognizable ’90s shounen tropes, but is still fast-paced and full of heart and ready to entertain in 2015.

Illustration by blue-eyes-louise. 

Sports anime and the Odagiri Effect

Anime

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You’re probably tired of hearing about my love for sports anime. Motivating storylines, passionate characters, and seriously cute boys make titles like Yowamushi Pedal, Haikyuu!, and Kuroko’s Basketball my essentials.

But I haven’t mentioned my husband’s love for sports anime. I didn’t force him to watch Yowamushi Pedal—like you might have assumed given the way I talk about it nonstop—he got into it himself. Now our Monday evening ritual is watching it together.

Still, we’re getting different things out of it. A super robot genre fan, he loves the way Yowapeda dramatizes cycling the way other shows depict mecha piloting. He cares a lot about technique and results. Whereas I savor the character development, relationships between characters, and any of their indications of emotion or vulnerability.

For better or worse, my husband isn’t into dudes. I am though, and to me Yowamushi Pedal is a fujoshi’s dream. He doesn’t see it in the slightest. It’s like a Magic Eye drawing that I can see and he can’t—and now that I’ve seen it one way, I can’t go back.

Until Navy Cherub’s Sports Anime panel at Katsucon, I didn’t realize there was a name for this—the Odagiri Effect. In 2000, there was a popular kid’s show called Kamen Rider Kuuga that starred actor Joe Odagiri as the titular masked rider Yusuke Godai. The live-action show was targeted at kids, but due to Odagiri’s dreamboat status, it picked up an unexpected secondary audience of housewives! Since then, Japanese kid shows have aimed at picking up multiple audiences. Although Kuroko’s Basketball and Yowapeda run in Shounen Jump, it’s impossible to deny the massive adult female audiences they’ve acquired. It’s not just the way the boys are drawn, but the mature way their emotional bonds are depicted.

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Sports animes’ multiple audiences were illustrated quite well by the Katsucon panel itself. I got there early and chatted with all the other women waiting. We discussed our favorite characters, our favorite ships, and so on. John had come with me, but he stuck to amassing new StreetPass contacts while I talked about girl stuff. Then, the male panelists came in, much to my surprise. While we talked about kids and women as sports anime target audiences, their very status as adult men indicated a third audience, too. And of course, the world isn’t so cut-and-dry that interests are decided by demographic, either!

The Odagiri Effect sounds like a win-win, since it generates money from a compounded audience, but the downside is that it plays it safe. Negative arcs about injury or lack of sportsmanship are resolved quickly and neatly, and while friendship abounds, romantic subplots are nowhere in sight. There’s no incentive to risk alienating any of the target audiences, so the show stays away from tackling complicated themes.

Either way, it’s nice to know the straight men in my life aren’t just humoring me when they agree to watch Free! with me.

Can you think of a show in which you’ve seen the Odagiri Effect in action?

Katsucon 2015 recap

Uncategorized

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I went to my first Katsucon when I was 22 years old. Since then, I’ve never missed a convention, not even when a blizzard (Kat-snow-con) threatened to keep us all home.

That’s six years of mid-February conventions, and all with my Valentine. (I tweeted that it’d been eight years, not six, because I am bad at math.)

However, John has been my only constant, really. I’ve spent Katsucon doing all kinds of things, from working in the maid cafe to reporting on Artist Alley in a wheelchair, after I broke my foot. Katsucon was the first convention I reported on back when I was an intern at the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star, and the reason I got a mention of my reporting published in Jezebel. Now, nothing can keep me away!

This year was far less exciting than previous ones. We showed up for just Saturday, waited in a short-for-Katsucon two-hour registration line, visited the Maid Cafe, (where one of our tablemates was hand fed by a butler!), played Hanafuda, and saw the Batmobile, all while I took photos of every Yowamushi Pedal cosplayer I could find.

John and I mostly spent it shopping—including buying our very first Perfect Grade Gunpla kit, the most technically complicated, physically large, and expensive model type that there is. Expect to hear a lot more about that at Gunpla 101.

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Other purchases: Peepo Choo, the graphically violent yet painfully close-to-home story of an otaku who discovers Japan is not his “arbitrary Neverland” of fellow fans. What Did You Eat Yesterday?, a poignant cooking manga/portrait of LGBT life in Japan. Machine Robo, starring the exploits of villain Devil Satan 6 and other campy Super Robot genre pioneers. The classics Akira and Metropolis. Together, everything on this table cost less than $80 total, which shows that you can get good deals at cons.

I’ve written a lot about Katsucon as a prime reporting opportunity, but it felt good this year to relax and catch up with friends. Did you go to Katsucon and if so, how was it?

Photo grid via my Instagram

Revisiting my most ambitious 2015 goal

Writing

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Last month, I told you about my creative fiction goal in order to stay accountable.

Let’s say the results were… less than stellar. Total word count: 4,219. Results: two short stories, not the planned five, about fan conventions.

My first story, “Your Biggest Fan,” is about a Hollywood-aspiring anime voice actor who thinks his fans are disgusting nerds. The tables are turned after he publicly humiliates a fan during a Q&A session, only for her to point a gun on him.

My second story, “Caroline,” is about a fandom convention that has turned into a commune and has had its doors open for the past eight years. It follows their lives after they find a baby in a dumpster and decide to raise her as their own.

I had hoped to share these stories with my readers at the end of the month. Unfortunately, neither of them are fit for human eyes… yet.

I realize now that learning to write fiction isn’t a goal I can check off in one month, but rather a lifelong process. Fiction is hard. It takes a completely different set of skills than nonfiction. A true story already has its twists laid out, and you as the writer only need to assemble them so they make sense. In a fiction story you have all the power, and that can be overwhelming.

Some of the most worthwhile goals to set are the ones you know will be the hardest. I challenge you today to set your own writing goals that are completely out of your comfort zone. If you write short stories, dedicate yourself to a novel. If you write sporadically, think about setting up a routine, or even a regularly updated blog.

I didn’t reach my goal, but that doesn’t mean I can’t. I look forward to sharing my creative fiction with my readers before anyone else—but not until I’m confident that it’s ready.

In the meantime, I’m preparing for the launch of my latest nonfiction book, Cosplay: The Fantasy World of Role Play, which will be out in May. You can pre-order it from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help me promote it, shoot me an email!

Photo via MixedDecal on Etsy