Now & Then, Here & There

**psygremlin** · #1 04-04-2007, 07:45 AM

Busy watching this at the moment. Thouroughly enjoing it, but I'm finding the contrast between the character design (sort of cute, big cheeked boy, cute girls, etc) and the brutality in it especially disturbing. There's been a few occasions I've actually felt very uncomfortable watching it.

Is it just me, or has anybody else felt this?

**senile_seinen** · #2 04-04-2007, 04:45 PM

I haven't seen this, but I'm curious - how would you relate it to the Gunslinger Girl anime? In that case, the lolis with guns are there precisely to illustrate just how wrong the idea is.

There's definitely a subset of Manga/Anime creators who are quite willing to brutalize cute characters to make a point: Katsura in Video Girl Ai and particularly Zetman, Otomo in Akira (remember Kaori?). And yes, Yu Aida in Gunslinger Girl. It looks like this falls in that category.

**Sphinx** · #3 04-04-2007, 05:06 PM

If there's anything I dislike in manga/anime it's that contrast. Really, grade schoolers with katanas...

**psygremlin** · #4 04-04-2007, 05:35 PM

Haven't seen Gunslinger Girl yet (still a relative newbie to buying and watching anime... still, you're never too old right?) but it's on my list.

I think that probaby is the intention of the story - to illustrate the loss of innocence during wartime. In that respect it does a good job and it's certainly one of the more thought provoking films I've seen so far.

Try and see it if you can - hopefully, I can pay you back a bit for putting me onto YKK and Ai-Ren (which I'm totally in love with). See what you mean about the deja vu with YKK. Another - more pessimistic in a way - take on a post-apocalyptic world and yet also really just a story about life happening.

**senile_seinen** · #5 04-04-2007, 09:03 PM

I don't know that I'd refer to Ai-Ren as pessimistic (or did you mean Now&Then...?). Yes, there were some terrible things going on in Ai-Ren, but the underlying theme was ultimately about the the value of experience (and love), the cycle of life, and how death is ultimately followed by birth and renewal. I can't say it was the feel-good manga of the week, but it's ultimately a lot less depressing than some of Gunslinger Girl is, for instance.

OTOH, we finished up Serial Experiments Lain not long ago, and I have to say that, while I really liked the series and would highly recommend it, I can't regard the ending as an especially happy one. In fact, it was less happy, I thought, than Ai-Ren.

Speaking of GsG, I've been reading the manga for some time. Started showing milady the anime, which we take in small doses, to avoid walking around in a depressive daze afterward. I'm only through show 4 or so, but we did see the one with Rico in the hotel (won't give away more than that for spoiler protection). Milady's reaction was as expected. My young son gets more hugs that he's used to after I watch an ep of GsG.

Now I'm wondering if they put in the scene in the manga with Henrietta explaining how another Fratello pair probably died - that one brought tears to my eyes...

**Sphinx** · #6 04-04-2007, 09:22 PM

Yes, Serial Experiments Lain has a quite unhappy ending. I haven't seen Gunslinger Girl yet myself, but I am downloading it as I type. I usually watch 5-6 episodes at least per day/night, so if it's as depressive as you say, I'll be in quite a good mood...

**psygremlin** · #7 04-05-2007, 01:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by senile_seinen

OTOH, we finished up Serial Experiments Lain not long ago, and I have to say that, while I really liked the series and would highly recommend it, I can't regard the ending as an especially happy one. In fact, it was less happy, I thought, than Ai-Ren.

I dunno, Lain is also one of my faves (but I'm also a Yoshitoshi ABe fan), and while the tone of the whole series is pretty much down, I thought the ending was slightly more upbeat than other parts of it. Depends on interpretation I guess. I think she was, afterall, just software (so we were basically watching a simulation running) and whoever was controlling it, had 'reformatted' her and placed her back in a later, happier time.

Hmmm... didn't word that quite right, but that's my view on Lain. sort of.

Funnily enough, there seems to be very few (from my limited exposure) anime and manga that has a genuinely happy ending.

**senile_seinen** · #8 04-05-2007, 01:41 PM

I was thinking about this convo this morning psygremlin, and realized that I hadn't recommended Grave of the Fireflies to you. If the content of Now and Then... is what I think it is, there's an interesting contrast there as well.

At least, I'm interested to hear what you think of the movie - it tends to be a Rorschach test for people more than a movie with a particular agenda, I think.

Re Lain, I thought it was a creative and entertaining mix of psychological theory, history (Vannevar Bush) and pseudohistory. Good stuff. Re Lain, I ran across an article yesterday that explores an angle of the whole AI versus real people thing (as in Lain and Chobits). Having watched Kamichu and done a little research, I got it immediately once I understood the connection.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comment...4&cid=17361502 (quoted out of the Economist). Note specifically the tenth para.

Shinto is a purely animist religion. In it, there's no supernatural difference between a person and a thing - both are imbued with the same degree of divinity and specialness. Lain living inside a navi - or a network of navis - is exactly as much a being in this belief system as her flesh friend Alice. Ditto Chii in Chobits.

Even thought of in a more western (Judeo-Christian) framework, I'd still have to ask you: Just what is the functional difference between the preference patterns on the neural network you have in your cranium and Lain's lines of code?

As I've said re: Chobits somewhere, I'm squarely with Alan Turing on this one. If it quacks like a duck, and you can't tell it's not a duck, then it's a duck. Whether it's software or wetware is irrelevant to the question.

Quote:

Funnily enough, there seems to be very few (from my limited exposure) anime and manga that has a genuinely happy ending.

Nope, you're just going straight for the heavy stuff. Want happy endings well written? Try my favorite romantic comedy manga: Midori no Hibi. Eight volumes of very funny shounen magical girlfriend romance carefully scanslated by Snoopycool. Most Shoujo romances tend to be sugary-happy, so I tend not to recommend them, although Kare Kano is not bad most of the time. In Anime my favorite is probably both seasons of Honey and Clover. Be sure to watch the two extra episodes of Season 1. Chapter L is some of the funniest stuff I've ever seen.

Likewise, I'd be remiss in forgetting to mention Mahoraba, lovingly scanslated by our own Hiyoko no Gao. I've carefully not read ahead in the original to find out exactly how the end happens, but I think it's impossible for it not to be happy. I didn't like the anime as well, so give it a miss until you've read most of the manga if you choose to watch it at all.

**psygremlin** · #9 04-05-2007, 07:04 PM

Wow! Once again I am deep in your debt! What you said about Lain makes perfect sense (haven't read the article yet, it's printed and lying here next to me). Graveyeard of the Fireflies is on my list, have only seen the trailer and I have a vague idea of what it's about, but I've only heard good things and would rather watch itwithout precnceptions anyway. Shall fill you in as soon as I've seen it.

Funnily enough, on the subject of things neural - had an inteesting coming together last week. Just finished reading Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (if you haven't read it yet, do yourself a favour and find it) and watched Paranoia Agent, which was a brilliant - for me anyway - visual interpretation of ideas (memes) spreading amongst people.

It's strange, but there's a part of me that often wonders, when we debate various animes (take haibane renmei for exampe - there's been hours of debate on what exactly the Haibane are (I say the souls of suicides that mist find redemption)) and yet I wonder if the writers come across these various websites and go "Eh? I meant what? I just wrote a story about girls with wings..." Must be the cynic inside me.

Thanks again for the commets and links - looking forward to delving in a bit deeper ad I'm already hunting down your manga recs - you're 2 for 2 so far, so I'm not complaining.

**senile_seinen** · #10 04-06-2007, 03:16 PM

I've run across meme theory before, and generally subscribe to it. It makes a lot more sense to me as a human model of development than genetics does now, given how little our species has changed genetically in the last 20 generations versus how much we've changed our patterns of being.

I haven't watched either Paranoia Agent or Haibane Renmei, so will add them to the list. I'm currently watching a fair amount of light stuff - Jigoku Shoujo and Gunslinger Girl are the only "dark" things on the viewing list at the moment, although Simoun is in queue along with some other stuff.

The "great discussion" about reader interpretation versus authorial intent is pretty much the backbone of postmodern literary criticism. People take all kinds of extreme positions (Stanley Fish's "Death of the Author" being a notable example), and, as usual, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Texts (books, manga, animes in this case) are created from ideas and a medium. The medium always distorts the idea somewhat. Then you have another distortion when the reader/viewer looks at the medium. Language wouldn't work if the transmission of ideas were completely unreliable - we wouldn't bother with it. But the subtler (and more contextual) the idea is, the more easily it is warped or lost entirely through layers of authorship, editing, reading and (in the case of manga and anime for westerners) translation. One reason that Serial Experiments Lain did as well as it did with us is because there's a common framework across cultures of understanding of how computer networks are made and how they operate. In this case, subtextual comprehension helps the reader get back to original meaning even if the translation is weak. Compare to Kamichu! or Jigoku Shoujo, where the culture just has different expectations.

Another issue of discussion is how much of a work of art flows out of the creator's conscious mind, and how much out of the subconscious. Again, I think this varies depending on authors. Katsura (Video Girl Ai, I''s, Zetman) rather obviously moves his characters around like pawns on a chessboard. Other mangaka like Kagesaki (Karin), Takaya (Fruits Basket), or Kojima (Mahoraba) seem to spend more trouble creating a coherent cast of characters and then let the plot flow from their interactions with each other. William Faulkner wrote this way (no recommendation for the method IMO), Tolkien wrote this way as well, so I hesitate to regard one form as superior to the other.

I'm involved in a scanslation group now, and I can honestly say that there's probably a lot of meaning that is obvious to a Japanese reader that is just plain missed in translation. Even if the translation itself were perfect, some things just don't translate with the same cultural references - things like puns based on kanji translations, for instance.