The Animanachronism

As my Japanese is nonexistent, I’m just hoping it’s nothing scurrilous written on the box.

1. Where does moe (or moé for the pronunciation pedants among us) happen? The site of moe must be in the viewer. When, therefore, we say of a character that she or he ‘is moe’ we are identifying the presence in her or him of traits which provoke or stimulate moe in us (and perhaps in an imagined community of ‘people like us’).

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‘This battle will be decided by whether or not you two stop acting like a pair of screaming amateurs.’¹

[This is part of a series of entries considering GAR. The first one sets out what’s happening, the second reinterprets the epic tradition through the lens of GAR, the third examines the relationship between GAR and gender and the fourth makes the case for moral GAR.]

Moving away from moral GAR back to GAR considered in general terms, I’m now going to explain how GAR can make you thin in just 28 days! why GAR is (mostly) a good thing for the anime viewer. [I'm keeping The GAR Diet to myself 'til the patent comes through.] (more…)

Psychological thriller which will probe the very darkest depths of the human soul

Genres are words - labels - we attach to things, as part of some giant, messy and Escher-esque Venn diagram. As genres are words, it’s all a matter of definition by example, which I have harped on about before. Continuing my commitment to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, I thought I’d throw down [?] a few thoughts on the way that we classify anime.

[The first two parts of this post are the boring bits. The third part is the interesting bit. Feel free to skip ahead.] (more…)

I positively refuse to use this image’s obvious caption

I am usually reluctant to write introspective entries. I fear that they all-too-often degenerate into uninteresting, solipsistic musings. If I wanted to put that sort of thing on the internet, I’d get a LiveJournal. But I was recently convinced that introspection can, on occasion, produce something interesting. This, in combination with a throwaway sentence in the Search for Number Nine, set me thinking about my own viewing habits. (more…)

A strange and twisted journey into methodology, during which I will kill off all animators, everywhere, namecheck the Father of Western Literature and (the ultimate challenge) talk about Gundam without boring people who aren’t interested in Gundam.

Why the busty succubus? Read on to find out, or perhaps to find out why that’s the wrong question. Alternatively, if you’re not very interested in ‘Theory’ with a capital ‘T’, go read another anime blog - there are plenty of good ones out there - and wait for my next entry. (more…)