Otakuism

So you’re an anime director and it’s the climax of the show. The big bad has revealed himself, every thing’s blowing up, the hero got his final power upgrade, punches are flying, everyone’s yelling, but some thing’s missing. It all needs just one more element to kick it up to eleven. Clearly, it needs Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony, specifically the climax of the fourth movent, cause nothing says epic action quite like a string section. Yes, Dvorak does show up rather commonly in anime, or at least I’ve found him in three different shows so I’m going to say he’s common.

I first heard it in One Piece during Luffy’s final fight with Crocodile. The Alabasta arc had already been going on for like a hundred episodes. All of the Baroque Works had been defeated, Pell had just sacrificed himself, and all of the Straw Hat Pirates were trying fruitlessly to stop the mindless bloodshed. And during it all Luffy’s stuck in an underground tomb fighting Crocodile for the third time, with the tomb collapsing around them of course. As soon as the New World started playing I knew it was all over. The scene also sinked well, as the happier, lighter movement started after Crocodile had been launched into the air. Just to note, One Piece isn’t that shy to other classical music. Chopper’s flashback arc makes brilliant use of Mozart’s Requiem, making the scene truly heartbreaking when it didn’t need to try that hard to make you cry even without music.

The New World Symphony is also used as the theme for Proist, the psychotic bitch main villain of Gaiking. Ironically enough she’s trying to destroy Earth and thinks that the New World Symphony is the only good thing humanity as ever produced, so much so that she even names her main mech, a giant self-replicating dragon made of nanomachines, Chou Maryu Dborak. Of course, Dborak eventually falls to the musical might of Gaiking the Great. It’s hard to beat Akira Kushida’s Sono Mei ha Gaiking the Great when it comes to hotblooded music.

And you can’t leave Legend of the Galactic Heroes out when it comes to classical music, since that’s what it’s whole soundtrack consists of. The New World symphony is used here as background for the Battle of Amlitzer, where the Alliance forces are completely crushed by Lohengramm. Rather ironic, since Dvorak composed the New World Symphony after traveling in America, and here it’s being used for a battle where the “democratic” forces are beaten. Then again, it’s better than being the main theme for a psychotic bitch.

Are there any other anime out there that use Dvorak that I haven’t seen? I’d love to know and get a real collection started.

IKnights article about his love of Karin got me thinking about if there was some forgotten or maligned anime I’ve seen that, despite my own high standards, I loved anyways. So I go to check out my MAL anime list and it turns out there’s not just one show that fits the bill, there’s a slew of shows that make me wonder how I ever finished them AND enjoyed them.

For instance, there’s Dragonaut, the most maligned series in recent memory (ie. from two seasons ago) and for good reason. It is a sloppy mess of a story filled with big boobs and bad CG. Admittedly it was probably the boobs that got me to watch the show, standards mean nothing before hormones, but I did finish it because I liked the characters and the story, however awful it was. There’s Grenadier, a show whose main selling point was that the heroine reloaded her gun just be swishing her breasts around. A pattern may be developing here actually.

Continuing on, there’s Elemental Gelade, which I doubt many remember. If there was ever a definition of generic fantasy anime then Gelade is it. Still, I watched all of it, no doubt helped along by how insatiably moe Rin is. Also had a great OP. Then there’s Gift ~eternal rainbow~, yet another eroge adaption that was probably forgotten because Kanon was airing at the same time. I can’t remember how I even started watching it or what drove me to complete it. It’s pretty average - there’s probably worse eroge shows - and to its own merit it has a few good Kaede moments towards the end. Keep in mind I also couldn’t finish ef, the eroge darling before Clannad started, which really says something about my slippery standards. Then there’s Mai-Otome…well, we all got duped into watching that so I can’t say much there.

Apart from the genuinely bad shows I enjoyed, there’s also the many goods ones that were for whatever reason tragically ignored. I will sing the praises of Bartender to the hills and back as one of the most brilliant adult pieces of anime ever made, but people easily dismissed it for not owning up to its epic hype, which admittedly I also fed. Betterman is the only anime I’ve ever seen that actually has horror that makes me huddle down in my seat, but because it’s old and mecha and had a somewhat whiny protagonist it’s forgotten.

Ufotable’s Futakoi Alternative is probably the best dramatic-romantic-comedy I’ve seen but many people just tuned it out, mainly for refusing to settle down into one category. Even when a show that defies genre conventions comes around people still ignore it for not following the same conventions they were already railing against. That’s more a fault with people in general, actually. Finally there’s Skull Man, which was a perfectly plotted dark and mature show. It was also based on a one-shot tokusatsu story written in 1970 from the guy who made Kamen Rider, so there wasn’t much hope for it to begin with. And then there’s all the old shows I’ve seen, but they’re old so nobody cares.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after so much blogging and so much watching, of both good and bad, it’s that anime really is the most subjective form of art. Objectively people will point to some work - invariably Hayao Miyazaki comes up a lot - and say “look! That’s the best of anime right there,” but that doesn’t work out. Anime is made of so many diverse elements - design, animation, characters, story, voice, merchandising - that even the worse show can have one element that some person out there will love it for. So, really, none of us should feel guilty for liking one show or entitled to like another one just because it’s critically acclaimed. In my head I call it the Aesthetics of Likeability, but if I really understood aesthetics could I actually have watched and enjoyed Dragonaut? Now that’s a question that requires some deep soul searching, which I don’t have time for cause I’m going to go watch some Kamen no Maid Guy.

NPR did a short segment on the amazing popularity of graphic novels, and of course manga is featured as an integral part of that explosion. There’s nothing really new or interesting to the segment, but about halfway through a line from an anime is played, and as soon as I heard it I swore I had heard it before. Lo and behold, it was a line from Takemoto of Honey & Clover. He always did have such unique ways of speaking. But the interesting thing is, where did they get a recording of Honey & Clover when the anime isn’t out in the US? Is there some secret otaku out there in the NPR offices? You can listen to the segment here.

Now that’s a yell.

I open up my issue of TIME and find a complete article about 4chan and Moot. It’s 4chan, in print no less! There’s also the fact that the Wall Street Journal did its own article on 4chan earlier. My favorite quote from the TIME article:

You may not realize it, but 4chan has probably touched your life. Possibly inappropriately.

Way to be subtle there. I hope to god there’s no actual news going on in the world right now that needs reporting.

Clearly the only way for the Japanese to solve this problem is the way they solve every other problem: giant, crow-killing mecha. I’m sure the ministry of Agriculture is already on it.

Why are there four different sub groups for Kanokon? IT’S FREAKIN’ KAN-O-KON! There’s not really that much plot in between all the fanservice to understand. I know, some people want to watch this show, but only one group should suffice for them. Ideally, all these wasted translators could spend their time subbing things I actually want - Xabungle, Dragonar, Layzner, Kuuga, Agito, Might Gaine, J-Decker - and various other shows that send me into fanboyish glee. Even more ideally, I would actually know Japanese, but reality doesn’t work that way. Curse you, Reality!