The Animanachronism

I’ve used this before, but the internet needs more reverse trap Hamlet.

I have an unsubstantiated theory that any boys who encounter Hamlet during their adolescence will become slightly obsessed with the play. It is very easy to read Hamlet as a misanthropic, withdrawn and rather ‘emo’ teenager, and - though this would seem very alien to the original audience, who lacked the concept - it’s no surprise that 21st century teenagers identify with him.

You can probably detect the voice of personal experience here, though I no longer identify with Hamlet in quite that way. For a start, although his age is much-disputed, there is textual evidence for a rather older Hamlet. And withdrawn teenagers are, for the most part, boring. But the obsession itself is harder to escape; to this day, productions of the play have me reaching for my wallet with the same irrational fervour that others use for figurines. (’Ooh, look! A 1:8 Ophelia, “distracted, playing on a lute, and her hair down, singing“!’)

And so it is that we come to Self Made Hero’s ‘Manga Shakespeare’ version of Hamlet. It’s a strange (though hardly the strangest) concept. Curiosity drove me to buy it. But is it manga? Is it Hamlet? And what’s it actually like?

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Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A’s features a group of magical antagonists whose combat terminology is in German, although this is by no means the only foreign language used in the series (Bardiche and Raging Heart are noted for their English, while ‘Asura’ is a Sanskrit term and so forth). Quite what the status and connotations of the German language are in Japan I’ve no idea (though I’d like to find out) so I can’t guess what the intention of the staff behind Nanoha’s German is.

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I don’t read enough manga. It’s not that I dislike it, it’s that I find it hard to relax with a book, or more specifically with the physical shape of a book, a codex. To ‘come home after a hard day’s reading and relax with a book’ carries a certain contradiction, as I’m sure you can see.

But I try. After all, manga has a number of practical advantages over anime as a form of entertainment: it’s much cheaper, and it’s available in the UK pretty much as soon as it’s available in the US because (glory be!) books don’t have those pesky Region Code thingies. [Wouldn't life be awful if they did?]

Credit is therefore due to Kaoishin-sama for putting me onto Ecole du Ciel. Ecole has what it takes to interest me: obscurity value, curiosity value and hawt Mobile Suit-on-Mobile Suit action value. Plus the manga-ka is Mikimoto Haruhiko, who has an impressive set of character design credits including a number of Macrosses (and the animation direction for Do You Remember Love?) and War in the Pocket. And the first volume arrived in my letterbox recently, so here I am talking about it. (more…)

How Culture makes one popular

[This is part of a series of entries considering GAR. The first one sets out what's happening.]

I had already felt GAR before I encountered the concept. After all, ‘unconquerable courage, the sheer will to accomplish the impossible, the willingness to sacrifice all for victory, and the ability to openly mourn the loss of something worth dying for’ have existed in storytelling generally long before anime. Indeed, for all that it’s compared to virtus, GAR’s history stretches back long before the Romans themselves. So indulge me - or ignore me - as I look back to an older meaning of ‘epic’. (more…)

One of the pleasures of a good university library is the periodicals section, offering the very latest in whichever field you happen to be studying, and often carrying articles from less established academics who are (whisper it) closer in age to an undergraduate than your average professor is. Periodicals are also, of course, the bleeding edge - there’s more experimentation, risk and (occasionally) failure to be found in them than in weighty hardback tomes.

My response when I heard about Mechademia was predictable: any journal which unites one of my interests with cultural commentary, which is in essence my degree subject (admittedly, I study the out-of-date written culture of my own country, not the up-to-date visual culture of another country), was a must-read. (more…)