Memes must sometimes be reinforced.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Demonbane is not, by any stretch of the imagination, good. It’s a visual novel franchise adaption, and it tries to squeeze a great deal of information into a mere twelve episodes: the first episode feels like it’s playing at double-speed, the OP/rapid-fire clipshow is only one minute long and events frequently occur during the credits. Despite all this cramming, lots of extra plot, helpful explanation and some whole characters are cut to create an unfortunate ‘All There In The Manual‘ situation. I didn’t understand the conclusion (which was written especially for the anime in the first place) without the aid of Wikipedia.

To add moral disapproval to the marks against it, Demonbane contains a certain amount of fanservice involving women of varying ages and proportions. The writers retained enough decency to put the beach and the onsen in the same episode, but I can’t help thinking that said episode’s bout of serendipitous-hypnotic-gas-induced-lolita-pseudo-rape could have been cut in favour of something which would have helped to clarify the plot. I’m assuming this was in the original game, for it was entirely gratuitous. I would’ve settled for a badly animated CG dragon, but perhaps the budget for bad CGI was devoted to the mecha.

[Before I'm accused of being part of the 'plot is more important than fanservice' camp (studied here), allow me to point out that (objectionable as fanservice is) the two can be integrated quite well. Take the fourth episode of Mazinkaiser: the fanservice becomes more graphic as the main movement of the episode's plot comes to its climax, and breasts are the key problem-solving element in the story.]

I don’t know why but I have a harder time accepting CGI than most. Macross Frontier’s action sequences provoke near-universal salivation; I think they’re brilliantly choreographed, but the CG animation strikes me as merely passable, and it’s among the best I’ve seen. In fact, I’ve only ever been really convinced by obviously computer-generated work for short parts of one OVA, Battle Fairy Yukikaze (which, strangely, is not mahou shoujo). Even a less picky (or more normal) viewer would, however, balk at the animation of Demonbane’s eponymous mecha, and some of the more throwaway opponents are downright poorly done: there’s no shoddy dragon, but there is a shoddy Dagon.

It’s a shame, because Demonbane itself is not a bad design. Rather than being cool simply by pleasing the eye, or being cool by looking gritty (like a Scopedog), Demonbane looks cool because it’s confusing. It’s body is odd, with giant shin-guards, a wasp-waist and massive shoulders, and it very clearly feels magical (only magic could justify such bizarre weight distribution). At the same time it feels just technological and robotic enough to be not entirely mystical. This impression is underlined by its frequent maintenance sessions, and the way that some of its attacks mimic moments of extremely unrealistic mecha science (the Lemuria Impact, combining an approval sequence and something suspiciously like a Shining Finger, is a prime example).

This uneasy combination of robotic and magical brings us to Demonbane’s most distinctive feature, it’s appropriation of elements from the Cthulhu Mythos. Until a few weeks ago my knowledge of Lovecraft extended only as far as dimly-remembered parodic elements from Discworld Noir, but Kaiserpingvin drew a connection between Lovecraft and the Alhazerd Precia Testarossa was seeking in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, sending me off to do a little reading.

Lovecraft’s monsters are apparently horrifying not because they’re evil, but because they’re incomprehensible, amoral things: their existence drives home our insignificance and the limits on our ability to comprehend the universe (Lovecraft’s term for his work’s ethos was ‘cosmicism‘). He also seems to have spawned the literary equivalent of a RPG campaign setting (and a real RPG - one which quantitatively tracks sanity!), encouraging other writers in his circle of acquaintances to borrow names and concepts from his work. This continued after his death, with various authors busily referencing away.

Of particular note among these inheritors is August Derleth, who edited and promoted Lovecraft. Derleth’s own additions, alterations and categorisations created a dualistic system, a titanic (if still eldritch) clash between two sides. Categorisation probably suited Derleth, a Catholic, and it’s continued with the influence of the aforementioned Call of Cthulhu RPG: it would presumably be boring if dice-rolling combat wasn’t involved, and it’s hard to have dice-rolling combat when your opponent cannot be comprehended by the puny faculties of the human mind.

Dualism also evidently suited Nitroplus when the story for Demonbane was written. The show borrows from Lovecraft quite widely - there’s a blizzard of grimiores to get your head around, Demonbane wields an arsenal of artefacts, the whole show is set in Arkham, the beach episode happens at Innsmouth, Nyarlathotep is cunning and manipulative, &c - but the borrowing is superficial because it doesn’t affect the underlying moral structure.

Demonbane is more Derleth than Lovecraft: it’s a story of good and evil and the antagonists are comprehensible. The hero’s battles have clearly-defined rules and are always fought with the hope of victory, leaving aside the point - my favourite point - about two thirds of the way through when matters briefly become futile and desperate. I suspect this was a conscious decision, because Nitroplus have written some games which are, frankly, messed-up: try Wikipedia’s summary of Saya no Uta for size!

If there was a mecha show which was truly Lovecraftian, it wouldn’t be much like this one. It would chart the struggle of an alcoholic hero to merely survive, rather than protect anyone. It would revel in the horrific, the unspeakable and the incomprehensible, rather than in cool special attacks. It would be punctuated by terrifying, chaotic battles with cultists in semi-biological mecha (designed by Escher, Giger and Bosch in committee, while on LSD), and the final, desperate conflict would leave the hero physically alive but comprehensively insane. In fact, it would be something like a mashup of Zeta Gundam and Evangelion.

Returning to Nanoha for a moment, Precia Testarossa’s attempt to reach Alhazred is arguably more Lovecraftian than Demonbane’s entire plot, for she descends through a rift into an unknown place which has no normal rules, and disappears. Demonbane’s hero travels somewhere where, we’re told, ‘human logic and the laws of this universe no longer apply’, but what happens there is standard mecha stuff, and our hero returns. Of course, while Nanoha’s void may be truer to Lovecraft, it is only the smallest of elements: Nanoha’s story clearly has a good and a bad side, and also has comprehensible antagonists (Figure 17’s inscrutable Maguar are much more Lovecraftian opponents, though they still obey discernable rules).

All of this is not, however, a problem for Demonbane (which has enough problems of its own), it’s an observation. We’re used to stories with clearly identifiable sides and happy endings, and Demonbane isn’t a great literary project or an attempt to troll future generations of academics, it’s the animated adaption of a visual novel. Plus, of course, you have to admire a story with the audacity to transform the Necronomicon (at the name of which one is meant to shudder) into a pink-haired tsundere in a gothic lolita dress.

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?

If you’re rushing off to find scanlations, don’t bother, because this is not a Japanese initiative. ‘Not Japanese?’, I hear you ask. Well, yes. It’s drawn (left-to-right) by Emma Vieceli and the text was adapted by Richard Appignanesi.

But it looks like manga - unlike Cliffs Notes’s effort, which apparently looks pretty occidental - though what can you expect from a company which has been a ball-and-chain on individual thought for fifty years? - and I think that’s enough for me. Just my preferred definition of poetry is ‘text where the author, not the publisher, decided where the lines end’, so with manga I go by appearances. Wikipedia tells me [!] that ‘manga’ merely denotes ‘comics’ in Japan, and certainly, judging by Vieceli’s own account of her time spent promoting this in Japan, the Japanese themselves aren’t necessarily concerned with its origins.

To my surprise, the text is Shakespeare’s own, although it’s a cut version with sound effects and the occasional one-sentence caption to introduce a scene. There’s also the addition of emphasis in the lettering, which leads to some interesting choices:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, enterprises lose the name of action.

But then, Shakespeare’s text on its own isn’t really much fun; it needs to be brought to life by someone.

Merely reading the text of a play is akin to holding a conversation with a skeleton. Living people are more entertaining than bones and Hamlet is much more fun when performed or, for that matter, drawn. Cutting the text is also not, per se, a problem, as Hamlet - with three available texts and well over four hours worth of dialogue - ought to be cut in performance for the audience’s sake. And the Manga Shakespeare textual consultant (de Somogyi) is something like a proper scholar, with experience editing Shakespeare for proper texts, and indeed he probably has proper letters after his name and all.

Still, this much excision is pushing it. Unlike a play in performance, you can pause a comic, put it down and do something else, like spending time with those loved ones who see you once a month when you come out of your hikikomori refuge. I suspect that this volume is aimed at fourteen-year-olds who appreciate manga but certainly don’t appreciate the Swan of Avon.

Actually, judging by the promise on the back cover that this is ‘a cutting-edge adaption that will intrigue and grip its readers’ it might be for the parents, teachers and librarians concerned about said fourteen-year-olds. And it’s true that not every teenager has the stamina for large chunks of anything in one innings. I’d like to think, however, that Hamlet is more Test match than Twenty20, and so I’m going to have to dock points for over-zealous pruning.

I’m no judge of the visual - only five of my posts, including this one, are in the ‘review’ category - but I enjoyed reading this. That’s significant: Shakespeare’s text is very good, but I wouldn’t read a cut version for pleasure, so the fact that I did enjoy this suggests that the art succeeds in adding something. There’s a lot more white space on the page than I’m used to. This lends an apt tenuousness or instability to the scenes of intrigue and in particular to the Ghost, but can sometimes look like simple wastage. The character designs could also be accused of being a bit workaday: Claudius is bald (ergo Machiavellian), Polonius is monocle’d (ergo pompous), and so on. In general, though, it was nice to look at, which is about the most incisive visual assessment I can offer.

Settings for Shakespeare adaptions need to add something (see the ‘95 film adaption of Richard III for a great choice of setting) and this manga’s choice of a cyber-Denmark has potential but isn’t exploited. A great deal more could have been done with electronic surveillance - the play is full of people watching other people - but the opportunity was lost. Still, cyber-Denmark is probably preferable to the option of manga-styled characters in Jaco-bethan clothing, which would have seemed odd at best, and Kurosawa already took the corrupt company option in The Bad Sleep Well.

The interactions between manga tropes and the text were perhaps what I enjoyed most. Hamlet’s ‘Lady, shall I lie in your lap?’ exchange with Ophelia is a new (or old?) spin on the lap pillow which seems to be a standard move in manga’s mating game (though, sadly, the scurrilous ‘country matters’ were cut). Similarly, sprays of flowers and petals appear behind Ophelia, in what looks like a standard technique from the shoujo toolbox. Standard, that is, until we reach her madness and death, at which point the flowers become Serious Business.

These interactions aren’t the product of the art, or the setting, but of the idea itself, the idea of Hamlet in manga form. But the form will always be a limitation too: like a movie adaption, a comic book is never going to be as visceral an experience as watching a live performance. Vieceli’s Hamlet is quite good, and I enjoyed it despite not being much of a manga reader, and despite the truncation of the text, but it could never be as carnal, as bloody and as unnatural as I like the play.

From one red-haired Karen to the next, then. I’ve wanted to write about The 08th MS Team for a while, in the way that one aspires to a difficult accomplishment: it’s hard to write about something which is generally so well-regarded. By way of experiment I tried watching the whole thing last Sunday, in suitably tropical conditions with the sun beating down on my windows like The Sun beating down on Gordon Brown whenever he screws up. I still don’t know if I’m up to the task, but at least I had a fun day off. (Spoilers, of course.)

I’m always surprised by how - unlike The Sun - The 08th MS Team is rather apolitical. It follows the standard Gundam approach to the armed forces themselves - the higher up the chain of command you go, the more unpleasant types you find - but there’s little or none of the political commentary found elsewhere in the franchise. To compare OVA to OVA - and excluding IGLOO because I haven’t seen it - 0080 touched on neutrality, 0083 had nukes and fear as a political tool and (I’ll grudgingly include it) Stargazer examined the use of hate. These OVAs aren’t scalpel sharp dissections - they’re mecha action shows - but they do at least have a political dimension.

The 08th is, however, a war story, and a love story. I think the word ’story’ must be stressed: this show’s realism is much-touted, yet in truth I’ve never found it especially realistic (if that is the right question to ask in the first place). It can be gritty and convincing, yes, but there’s also something operatic about The 08th MS Team, a sense of convenience and arrangement which at times makes it feel like a vision. This reaches its peak in the seventh episode, with the idealistic lovers bathing in anime’s best improvised onsen, surrounded by swirls of snow and ice and backed up by an unsettling string piece form Tanaka’s excellent score. And at the close the same snow, or perhaps steam, seems to swallow Aina whole.

It may peak in the seventh episode, but this sense of vision permeates the show. Norris’s defeat of the 08th MS Team produced two iconic images: his Gouf Custom silhouetted against the sun, and the same Mobile Suit splashed with an unfortunate Guntank pilot’s blood. Both are iconic precisely because they are so patently built to please. Indeed, part of the pleasure in a lot of humanoid mecha is the way that, however loudly one tells oneself that these are just machines, the human mind will insist on perceiving living things (consider the defeated Zaku struggling to raise its hand in the second episode, for example).

[Is that last sentence evidence that I've failed to grow up? Probably.]

Even when the Team are fighting in the jungle, the show rarely resorts to ‘mecha obscura‘ à la Gasaraki: it’s easy to see what’s going on. Indeed, the jungle warfare is itself consciously picking up on the Vietnam War, or rather said conflict as it exists in the popular imagination. Although, as Author has pointed out, the actual situation of the Team is not like Vietnam - and the One Year War as a whole resembles a certain theatre of World War Two, right down to the sudden attack using a relatively new, carrier-based style of warfare. That is, however, a story for another time, and of course the weapons of mass destruction were unleashed at the beginning of the One Year War.

One of the shots Author picked out. I don’t know my way around shading, but I can tell when the animators are making the Shinigami’s head look like a skull. (Author also notes the Moral Grey Area Edition’s idiosyncratic aspect ratio.)

The opening scene of Gundam 00 is an interesting contrast to The 08th MS Team’s air of the artificial. With its irregular focus, its haze of dust, and its shaky ‘camera’ struggling to keep track of the rampaging Anfs this sequence is of course obviously artificial in another way: it’s plain that we’re watching animation pretending to be a camera lens. But it tries to give the impression of something which isn’t arranged, mainly because the rest of Gundam 00’s action is about to shove its choreographed nature in our faces with Wing levels of power imbalance. The contrast is necessary because Gundam 00 was in part about how unfair it feels when someone comes down from the sky in his overpowered lump of military hardware and proceeds to blow you away.

Funnily enough, this is part of what The 08th MS Team does too. It’s a story about a group of ordinary soldiers facing a prototype weapon, rather than (as with much of the rest of the franchise) a hero piloting a prototype weapon and killing ordinary soldiers. The Apsalus, in its several variants, is the suitably menacing zenith of the show’s generally excellent mechanical design, a hideously bulbous, gravity-defying monster which (brilliantly) retains the cyclopean mono-eye. Need I mention its gaping - mouth? - which we’re forced to re-examine when Aina suggests Ginias built it as a surrogate womb?

Probably not.

By such Freudian paths we come to the characters themselves, about whom I have little to say. To borrow Hidoshi’s words, since he puts it well:

The cast plays upon archetype quite a bit. . . . the typical characters of a wartime drama take the stage. But a cliché is not always a bad thing, and by and large the cast manage to escape their moulds and endear themselves to the viewer. They do nothing particularly new, but their showing is a strong one, and of a high calibre.

It is the cast of a wartime drama; The 08th MS Team is a wartime drama, more than any other Gundam I’ve seen and perhaps more than any other mecha anime I’ve seen. It takes a group of familiar people and puts them through some easily recognised situations - futile battles, love across a divide, a Dear John letter &c - but it does it with great panache, a compelling touch of opera and the roar of Norris’s 75mm shield-mounted Gatling gun (I’m salivating). What’s not to like?

The last episode, that’s what. Sinking to a homily on the subject of naming is simply gauche. It’s especially gauche at the end of a series which managed, most of the time, to convey its messages without shouting. I can see the arguments for having an epilogue episode. The Universal Century story, as a whole, is the story of different people repeating the same mistakes. A brief glimpse of a life outside warfare is a reassuring reminder that people can escape those mistakes, in the same way that Conrad, for example, is sometimes praised for highlighting the transience of imperial rule at a time when it could seem everlasting. (Similarly, War and Peace would be a lesser book if it was just called War.)

Insert obligatory Edwin Starr reference.

Infinite Ryvius - which is not a mecha show, but rather The Prince in the style of Dawson’s Creek, with fly-by-wire robots in the background - has an epilogue designed to do just that, to reaffirm that things can go right even if they’ve previously gone horribly wrong. G Gundam did something similar: the final five episodes might have been lacking in comparison to the superb forty-fifth, but they did remind us that winning the Gundam Fight wasn’t the point of the show. And ∀ Gundam is arguably performing this function for the entire Gundam franchise: one can escape the war, though one might have to be a cross-dressing chauffeur to do it.

Sadly The 08th MS Team does not benefit from its epilogue. The eleventh installment ended adequately - no, quite well, with just enough information about the lovers’ fate, and the sight of the unified Team running towards the Shuddering Mountain. The twelfth episode is an unfortunate superfluity in an otherwise restrained series, but then nothing ends perfectly. Our maimed hero, whose idealism had, at best, mixed results, would probably agree. The weak finish might leave The 08th MS Team looking like it’s missing a limb, but I can love it despite that.

Blogiography

• Roasty-beefy-weefs (?) recently used watching The 08th MS Team as the catalyst for a consideration of Gundam romance, then and now.

The funny thing is, wildarmsheero is right: Code Geass doesn’t have a pretentious bone in its body. It’s the fans who are the pretentious ones. The show is just noise and pictures, and it’s the fans who shove the meaning on it. We’ve been here before, and we don’t need to say anything about Code Geass at all - it can just be enjoyed. Nevertheless, some of us find it even more enjoyable if we do say things about it, so, while we don’t need to talk about Kallen, I want to. It’s viewer’s prerogative time.

As I noted in my last entry on the show, Kallen’s resemblence to Domon Kasshu has become something of a running joke. To briefly run through the main similarities, both have the same hairstyle, both pilot mecha which are the last, best hope for (Neo) Japan, both are attracted to potential partners who have white-haired fathers, both use a burning-right-hand-of-death as a signature attack and both are hotblooded. Indeed, certain /m/en have decided that Kallen is the daughter of the hotblooded King of Hearts and Rain Mikamura, part of Domon’s rather large speculative family (that image is only one version). I’ve no idea if this similarity is intentional or not - though I suspect it is - but then that’s not the issue; we see it and that’s what matters

Badass mother.

The key thing, as I see it, is how the hotbloodedness - the shouting, the assertiveness, the red mecha - is out of place in Code Geass. Omo pins Kallen down: she’s ‘[h]ardly a paragon of competence, [. . .] the contrast to that “JUST AS PLANNED” hook some Code Geass viewers dig’. Domon Kasshu’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer in G Gundam; much of the show’s plot, such as it is, is built around him not spotting important things. But that’s ok, because the world of G Gundam is one where hotbloodedness and martial skill win the day. (Winners in the hands of a Gundam God, as it were.)

This is not the case in the world of Code Geass. I’m not sure it’s even correct to conceive of Geass’s conflicts as things which are won or lost, but in any case if they are won they’re won by supernatural powers, preternatural intelligence and pure rhetoric. So, while Domon was the hero in his show, Kallen is the hero’s tool in this one. And I think Code Geass rather points this out with Kallen’s tendency for endearingly o’er-hasty actions, like interrupting a diplomatic discussion while wearing only a towel.

In fact, Kallen provides a lot, though by no means all, of the fanservice in the show - being seen about her ablutions (three times so far), wearing a bunny-girl costume and of course piloting a mecha with a motorcycle seating system and camera angles to match. [According to a biking relative of mine, motorbikes were one of the first spheres in which Japanese engineering really kicked in. This may be relevant to the Guren's design.] Kallen is the writers’ Mikuru, which perhaps provokes ‘fourth wall moe’, a desire to protect a character from something outside the show itself.

The other thing about Kallen, of course, is that she’s a half. Or a double. Or rather, she’s really neither a half nor a double, just a human being, but as far as her fellow Britannians are concerned she’s a half (hence Milly’s efforts to conceal the fact). Indeed, she has four names; naming conventions being what they are, we could arrange them in a pleasing chiasmus, as Kallen Stadtfield Kozuki Karen. I’m using ‘Kallen’ because of Wikipedia (a good example of said website’s not-always-positive ability to establish orthodoxy) and because it’s what appears on her friends’ phones when she calls.

The ninth episode of Code Geass, ‘Refrain’ is Kallen’s episode, and it focuses on complicity, in the form of Kallen’s mother and the hotdog vendor, both of whom serve Britannians and both of whom turn up later as Refrain addicts. Given how several of the other refrain users are reliving Area 11’s time as a free country (’Nippon! Nippon!’; ‘Japanese technology is the best in the world!’) I’d say the episode is also jabbing at some people with a nostalgia habit (here in Narnia you’d make a killing selling Refrain at the Last Night of the Proms).

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.

For my part though, as the viewer rather than a creator, mixing magic and German brings to mind Goethe’s Faust and also the eerie casting scene in Der Freischütz. Not unhelpful associations, though it’s a little disorientating to be watching a magical girl throw bullets and thinking of Kaspar and Max. Unfortunately, because I actually understand a fair number of German words, sometimes the effect isn’t as impressive. When Vita shouts ‘pferd(e)’ I chuckle, because I can’t help but think of Karura:

HORSE: A type of Pleasure involving horses, HORSE is considered both desirable and acceptable. Brown and bay horses are most commonly used.

This HORSE experience illustrates the difficulty of encountering, in anime, non-Japanese words from a language that you yourself comprehend.

Allow me to pause, and recommend Avatar’s account of subtitling A’s. It’s interesting to read how all this works at the coalface, so to speak, and Avatar highlights how many minds the script has to pass through before it reaches the subtitle viewer:

I know practically no German whatsoever, of course . . . but that’s almost certainly the case for the translator as well, especially if they’re working from a script with the German poorly converted into romaji (and listening to it being read by VAs who don’t know German either, and even that is assuming that the Japanese writer didn’t blow it in the first place, which happens a lot too.)

In a glass darkly, or what?

Anyway, foreign words sound cool and a bit mysterious. You can see this in English: I’ll stick with Faust and use Kit Marlowe’s English Doctor Faustus as an example. Marlowe gives the bad Doctor a long summoning incantation in Latin which would sound much more pompous and stupid if Faustus just reeled it off in English. Latin, with its antique literary and religious associations, supplies a mystique which English doesn’t have (to an English-speaker).¹ The same thing’s going on when ‘Wandering Swordsman: Recollection’ becomes Samurai X: Trust & Betrayal. (And why not? Samurai sell better to English-speakers than mere swordsmen.)

The other effect that foreign words have relies not on mysteriousness but on comprehension: ‘Ah, I see what they did there!’ A simple and classic example from English-language media is the name of the hero in The Matrix. ‘Neo’ is ‘new’ in Greek, and it’s also an anagram of ‘one’. ‘Ah, I see what they did there!’ say the fans, deriving some pleasure from the thought that some people won’t have seen was done there. Or they look it up later and derive some pleasure from the thought that, even if they didn’t get it at the time, they can at least use Wikipedia.

This is, in fact, a form of intellectual fanservice. It can be played on many levels, depending on the complexity and obscurity of the foreign words used. The Servants in Fate/stay night are a fine example of fanservice for mythology buffs. Neon Genesis Evangelion’s opening sequence is, like the segmented structure of Foucault’s Pendulum, an exercise in fanservice for fans of Kabbalah. Kyon’s nickname is fanservice for fans of the Cynics. ‘Vader’ means ‘father’ in Dutch. And so forth.

Even after learning a foreign language, one translates the words into one’s first language in one’s head. It’s only languages learned in early childhood, and languages learned through long immersion, which completely lose their mystique. So the two functions of unfamiliar words - mystique and comprehension - are not really mutually exclusive. Put a main character in a Gundam called Justice, and you (first use) make him sound cool and also (second use) make a point about a change in his character and role to any fans who understand the word. Put him in a Gundam called Infinite Justice and you (first use) make him sound really cool and also (second use) make a rather blunt allusion to the original title of Operation Enduring Freedom - but perhaps that’s territory best left unexplored.

OS GLADII MEI SVM

This can be a complicated and confusing business for a native English-speaker. Sometimes, something which might sound utterly badass in Japan comes across as silly-sounding. For all I know, sometimes the opposite happens. Sometimes these things can pass through silliness into badass territory on the other side: ‘I am the bone of my sword’. And sometimes, as in the case of My Otome’s ‘Garderobe’ Academy, one doesn’t know what to think: Cupboard? Toilet? ‘Guard-Robe’ (which is not unlike the word’s origin anyway)?

Yet - perhaps because of these confusions - I like the use of foreign languages in my anime. By turns the use of foreign tongues makes me feel cosmopolitan, massages my ego, amuses me, and sends me Wiki’ing furiously. Now and then - as with the collision between Vita and Der Freischütz - it actually does something unexpected, brilliant and probably unintended on the scriptwriter’s part, and these moments of ‘*clasm’ (’Linguaclasm’? ‘Glossaclasm’?) are one of the things I watch anime for.

In fact, I’m beginning to enjoy it more when English is misused in anime than when it’s used correctly. This is probably because I love wordplay so much, but - to take Code Geass as the almost-inevitable example - I like the way Britannian Knightmares have a loading screen which says ‘we shall be the shields which defend our momeland’. Why use ‘motherland’ or ‘homeland’ when you can have both? Similarly, the eyecatch says ‘Lelouch of the Revellion’. It’s almost certainly a mistake, but, as an accidental combination of ‘revolution’ and ‘rebellion’, it reflects the Black Knights’ uncertain status (a ‘revolution’ is more egalitarian, at least nominally), and it also reminds me how much I revel in the show as a whole. Strangely, the standard of Geass’s English can be quite high.

Linguists divide languages into family trees, and I’ve heard English described as the world’s ‘rape child’. It’s an odd yet accurate metaphor. The precedent for all this was set by the Normans, whose conquest of England has certain superficial parallels with the fate of Area 11 (the arrival of new, more mobile warriors in the form of mounted knights, for example). It’s thanks to the period that followed that English-speakers usually have at least two ways to say what they mean, one with words derived from Old English and one with words derived from Anglo-Norman. And because I like the idea of new words, I’m broadly in favour of the Japanese - or anyone else - (ab)using English, however disrespectfully it’s done.

Char was forever attracting young female newtypes and the indefinite article.

I was discussing this recently with a friend who enjoys josei manga. He pointed me to the discussion page for josei’s Wikipedia entry. One Wikipedian suggests that ‘josei’ may have been appropriated by English-speaking fans, and proposes renaming the article, and then a Japanese user chimes in:

‘Josei’ in Japanese connotes woman or women in general usage. Josei in Japanese does not connote ‘comic books intended for women’. If English-speaking anime fans think Josei connotes ‘comic books intended for women’, they are raping our Japanese culture by showing no respect for Japanese language.

[I should point out the misuse of 'connotes'; it's irritatingly common for people who have English as a first language to confuse denotation and connotation, so I'm not surprised to see it causes problems for people who learn English as a foreign language.]

Now I normally try to avoid reading the politicking of Wikipedians, and I’ve no idea whether they’re actually right, but I’ve noticed that fans outside Japan are frequently more comfortable with an adopted Japanese words. A little digging around reveals that a lot of our loanwords (like ‘hentai’) have been wrenched from their contemporary Japanese meaning - not that this means we should be trying to preserve ‘original’ meanings. I suppose I’m just newly aware of the importance of the mouth saying the words to the words’ meaning. (Not unlike the difference between ‘yaoi’ seen on a book and ‘yaoi’ seen on a paddle.)

Maybe the use of foreign languages is an exercise in остранение (now I’m doing it too), defamiliarisation - and here we come back to the first use for foreign words. Flip the girl upside down, silhouette her and throw some English in (’she found herself on an island’ might be a good start) and you’ve created something considerably more interesting than just a picture of a pretty person and a comment next to it. I don’t want to sound too cynical about that, because that’s how these things are done.

I recall seeing an Othello set emblazoned with the slogan ‘The mysterious game from the East’. Although Othello was formulated in Japan, I’d hardly call it ‘mysterious’ - but of course if it’s ‘from the East’ then it must be mysterious in some way.

Notes

1. A mystique which is subverted at the close of the play when Faustus uses a terribly inappropriate quotation from Ovid, ‘Oh, run slowly, slowly, HORSEs of the night’ (’O, lente, lente currite, noctis equi‘). Faustus is terrified because devils are coming to claim his soul but he quotes a lover wishing the night would pass slowly so that he can spend it in his mistress’s arms. This is probably a joke Marlowe threw in for the well-educated members of his audience (see the second reason I propose for using foreign words) as well as a subtle touch to remind us how sin-bound Faustus has become. (Marlowe, unlike Goethe, chose to give the story a BAD END. Very BAD indeed.)

UPDATE: Author comments on остранение and the dangers of o’er-broad terms (two subjects not unrelated).

This is probably my only chance ever to type this, so I’ll take it.

This blog of mine glows with some awesome DICTION! It’s burning prose tells me to convince you! Take THIS! My text, my pictures and all of my spoilers! SHINING BLOGGER’S WORRRRD! Go! GO! GO!!

It’s ritualistic. I find it useful to think about mecha shows which for convenience’s sake we’ll pigeonhole as ’super robot’ in terms of ritual, and Mobile Fighter G Gundam is right at the top of the Magic Words pile. Not only is there ‘This hand of mine . . .’, there’s also a shedload of signature attacks and, of course, ‘Gundam Fight! Ready . . . GO!’ G Gundam itself extracts a lot of mileage from modulating its rituals, varying the wording and the speakers to emphasise various things (finishing with a duet, the ‘Love-Love Sekiha Tenkyoken’); then the phrases take on a life of their own and furnish /m/ with a heightened, (over-)dramatic armoury of expressions.

It’s also a ritual which marks the show’s emotional climax in the forty-fifth episode, ‘Farewell Master! Master Asia’s Last Breath’. The episode’s title makes it obvious that Master Asia will be making his exit, which you might think would lessen its impact. Normally, perhaps it would, but this is the world of ritual, where you always already know what’s coming even if you don’t know quite in what manner it will come. And it’s the manner of ‘Master Asia’s Last Breath’ which adds the crowning emotional bite.

Whenever Domon and Master Asia perform ‘Look! The East is burning Red!’ it’s a precious moment: it’s introduced when they first meet in Shinjuku (YouTube for reference; the ritual begins at 3:33) and repeated only rarely as the series proceeds. It’s also enthralling in its ludicrousness. This is just a massively amped-up form of greeting, or a celebration of the School of the Undefeated of the East. Like a lot of the best things in life, it seems essentially pointless.

But its performance in the forty-fifth episode is still - for those of us willing to accept G Gundam’s terms and premises - the emotional culmination of the preceeding story. Finally we (well, me - you may have figured it out earlier) realise why the East is meant to be burning red: it’s the sunrise. And the ritual is the ultimate reconciliation between master and pupil, the passing on of a legacy and also a mechanism to ensure that Master Asia can realise the error of his ways and still go out shouting - an important consideration in a world where even the horses are hotblooded.

The sunrise is especially appropriate because of the nature of Master Asia’s plan. Master Asia is really a (much) manlier version of Princess Mononoke’s San: noticing the devastation caused to the Future Century’s Earth by the Gundam Fight and by human habitation in general, he resolved to remove humanity. (I suppose this makes him an eco-Char.) As Domon points out, Master Asia’s solution is an overreaction as a paradise without humans would be rather pointless. (Indeed, from Berkeley’s perspective, if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, there is no tree.) So it’s fitting that Master Asia sees the sunrise from the beach and declares it ‘beautiful’. (This Ghibli moment is a little odd when it’s ∀ Gundam which is usually tagged as ‘the Miyazaki Gundam’, but then ∀ has a certain ecological awareness too.)

Anyway, as a counterpoint to Master Asia’s aspirations, G Gundam repeatedly showed us rural idylls and then used the Devil Gundam to completely trash them. Most of the Guyana arc, for example, is spent in a landscape of wide lakes and lush forests. Then, when the Devil Gundam arrives, it turns into a hellish disaster area, with earthquakes, fires, and disgusting mechanical tentacles infesting the landscape (quite a lot could be written on the way G Gundam associates machines and corruption, including the Devil Gundam tentacle-raping a planet). The same thing happens to Lantau Island and Neo Japan as the series continues, with the process happening more quickly each time it repeats.

[Incidentally, the way the panoramas are drawn actually reminded me rather of Monet, in the way they look, well, blobby. And one of the shots of a Hong Kong street strongly resembled Pissarro's series of paintings of the Boulevard Montmartre. I can't help but wonder if this is all intentional, but I know so little about both Impressionism and animation technique that I'm at a loss.]

Master Asia certainly does a great deal of damage to the environment in the process of trying to save it. But then there was something badly wrong with his chosen tool, something with miraculous powers that fell to earth and was corrupted. Or, in other words, I’m both irritated and entertained by G Gundam’s habit of throwing vaguely allegorical names at you and then probably not doing anything with them. Probably:

Despite the terrible things I’ve done, there has never been one Devil Gundam cell on my body!

Put your faith in our Gundams!

I was amused to learn that the God Gundam and the Devil Gundam underwent a renaming program for the US dub. I suppose YHWH Gundam was unpronounceable. ‘This shrub of mine burns with an awesome POWER! It’s flaming voice tells me to bring the Israelites out of Egypt,’ &c.

Blogiography

• The Nihon Review reviews G Gundam.
• OGT muses on the experience of rewatching it.

‘Pizza Butt’ is an inelegant nickname. I propose ‘Beauttocks’ as an alternative.

You may recall that in the first episode of the first season of Code Geass, one of the resistance fighters, having been wounded, reaches out towards a button next to a picture of his family, mutters ‘Nippon banzai!’ and blows up the truck he’s driving. Now I am not Japanese, and in fact I have my doubts about the act of suicide, but I nevertheless found this moment rather stirring. The scene as a whole, however, is also rather disturbing - and not, I hasten to add, because of any patriotic fervour or jingoism, but for a rather subtler reason. This, remember, is the context: the resistance have got their hands on a container of what they think is a gas weapon from the Britannian military, and the lorry carrying it it is trying to escape through Tokyo’s old subway system.

Gas. Tokyo’s subway system. You don’t have to be Professor Plum to know why this combination of weapon and location makes Mr ‘Nippon banzai!’ seem rather less heroic, but for anyone who hasn’t figured it out yet, it was Aum Shinrikyo on the Tokyo Metro with the Sarin. This doesn’t mean there’s some kind of reductive equivalence being drawn between Area 11’s resistance and Asahara’s cult - though given Lelouch’s comparison of himself to the Messiah at the Battle of Narita it would be interesting to compare the Black Knights to a cult - but it does mean it’s very hard to look at the screen and go ‘Yeah! Nippon banzai!’ - and if you are doing that, you need to pay closer attention.

I’m not an expert on Japan, but I’ve been told that nationalism is one of the hot potatoes of Japanese politics, for fairly obvious historical reasons which I shall avoid mentioning like a dubious History textbook. This show is certainly prepared to talk about nationalism. As well as overtly handling it by featuring resistance fighters - or terrorists - it refers to those aforementioned historical reasons covertly: the day of the year that Britannia invaded Japan, August 10th, is the (real-life) anniversary of the day that Japan’s leaders decided to surrender in 1945, for example. I cannot, however, think of a moment of uncomplicatedly heroic nationalism in Code Geass. There’s always a figurative container of nerve gas unsettling things inside the resistance fighters’ metaphorical truck. In general, the Black Knights are characterised by dubious methods and blind obedience to two people - C.C. and Lelouch - who don’t see the liberation of Japan as an end but as a means.

* * *

‘Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty,
Make thee mightier yet.’
[And we think other nations have strange rituals!]

So much for jingoism. Let’s talk about empires. Code Geass’s rather complex alternate history - you could accuse Okouchi of implausibility, if you thought plausibility and history had anything to do with one another - places Britannia in charge of the entirity of North and South America. Understandably, questions have been asked about Britannia’s connection to the United States of Reality.

How you react to this connection rather depends on your political views. If you think the USA is an expansionist power which likes to invade other countries to get its hands on their resources, then of course you’ll think that Britannia is a representation of America, because that’s what Britannia is. As it happens, I don’t think that that’s a fair description of the United States; I’d agree that the US doesn’t exactly have a shining track record, but it’s no Great Satan and it’s ethos is miles away from, and considerably more confused than, the Britannian Empire’s (of which more below).

So I don’t think Britannia’s just a thinly-clothed stand-in for the US. It certainly makes viewers think of the States, and it may serve as a vehicle for (thinly-)veiled criticism of certain recent events in US foreign policy. (For proper anti-Americanism, try Gasaraki, or Angel Cop.) But it’s up to the viewer to go ‘Yeah, the US is like Britannia, and therefore sucks!’ Or, alternatively, to go ‘Yeah, this show’s criticising the US, and therefore sucks!’ Both remarks fail to account for Code Geass’s ability to muddy waters.

Code Geass isn’t a simple portrait of America’s foreign policy. But it certainly is a portrait of conquest and colonisation, which is one of the things that makes the use of a stylised British Empire so appropriate: we were lucky enough to be Top Nation at a time when it was more-or-less acceptable to go around conquering places and settling in for the long haul. Various features of the Empire’s rule play on the colonial process, including it’s use of collaborators: returning to the very first episode, the masked soldiers who are dropped in to ‘cleanse’ the Shinjuku ghetto are honourary Britannians, who are promised full citizenship as an incentive. And there’s Suzaku, of course.

‘Social Darwinism’ is the in-phrase to describe the ethos of the Britannian Empire, and it’s applied with considerable thoroughness, right down to the way that Emperor Charles (and that’s a bad sign) manages his family. I know I’m not the first to note that Lelouch himself runs along similar lines in his attempt to overthrow Britannia: consider his remark that the Battle of Narita is a good way to weed out the weaker Black Knights. However, unlike the state of most (if not all) historical empires, the Britannian system of values is more-or-less coherent: the strong should rule the weak, and the Britannians are the strong. Granted, it’s amoral, but you never hear them complaining when they’re defeated - though that is something Lelouch has yet to actually properly do. (This is reminiscent of Reinhard von Lohengramm’s suggestion that he’d be happy to be succeeded by anyone who’s clever enough to usurp his position.) It’s a bit like an empire as it would be if Akagi designed it: not the White Man’s Burden but perhaps the Mighty Man’s Privelege.

* * *

‘Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor Shall my Sword sleep in my hand . . .’

Why ‘Britannia’? Well - and from this point on I should say I’m only expanding some ideas proposed by iniksbane - a good place to start would be McCarthy’s remarks in a recent Anime World Order podcast (I’ve transcribed her words, but the punctuation’s mine and I sliced bits out for flow):

‘England is kind-of like Japan’s Narnia [. . .] Everybody is very friendly, the villains all sound like Jeremy Irons. It’s not a real place. And I think that one of the things about being a small island with a very established monarchy and a very interesting racial mix which we try to pretend is completely homogenous - but which isn’t - is that we are a mirror for Japan.

We have a very traditional education system [. . .] we have a society of people who tend to be understated, who tend to be socially quite compliant, socially interested in keeping the peace between each other [. . .] and if you start to look at Japan as Japan really is, rather than Japan as most people perceive it: as a society with big regional variations - that’s parallelled [yes, that's how we spell it ~ T.A.] in Britain; as a society with big economic variations across the country, in industries and in areas for posperity - so really we are very close to each other. [. . .]

And for that reason, I think that Japan has begun to use Britain as a mirror, as a way of saying things about Japan that they fear, or that they dread, or that they’re not sure of, by holding them up in Britain.

This seems relevant to Code Geass, particularly so since the ‘British’ elements in the Britannian Empire are taken from the fantasy of Britain, of knights, aristocrats and the Arthurian tradition (I’m sure Saber is rattling in her grave). In fact, there’s a certain Celtic tinge (fringe?) to the show, what with the Arthurian nomenclature for special Knightmares and Schneizel’s ship, the fact that the first member of the Britannian line was a Celtic leader, the use of Scottish place-names for mass-produced Knightmares and of course the ‘Geass’ - though the connection to the geis of Irish mythology has never been officially confirmed. Or denied.

[Incidentally, quite a lot of medieval Arthurian literature was actually written in France, which suggests that Arthurian Britain was serving as a kind of mirror back then too. And when the English did write about Arthur, they sometimes did it in a rather knowing way.]

So, if this fantastical Britan(nia) is serving as ‘Japan’s Narnia’, then Code Geass could be read as a ‘taste-of-your-own-medicine’ colonial narrative (and, trust me, Japan’s medicine was, at times, bitter stuff). One of the popular interpretations of The War of the Worlds runs along these lines: the theory goes that Wells has suburban Britain invaded by technologically advanced, mecha-piloting aliens as a way of saying ‘See? Not very nice, is it?’ And there are certainly colonial resonances in the book, such as one character’s prediction that the Martians will train some humans to collaborate with them in hunting the rest, and in the way the Martians eventually succumb to disease (disease being the way to die in the colonies).

* * *

And if you absolutely must apply Rule 34 to Beauttocks, please remember that she has a (vaguely psi-shaped?) stigma underneath her left breast. Titillation is one thing; inaccuracy is quite another.

Ultimately, while it takes place in a colonial setting, Code Geass is a cartoon about a few specific people, and giant robots, fighting. It’s not a non-fiction book about imperialism. What’s most visually memorable about this show are the attributes of its characters: Lelouch’s eye, mask and voice; C.C.’s hair, straightjacket and pizza obsession; Karen/Kallen’s Kasshu headband and Guren Finger; Suzaku’s snazzy white-and-gold uniforms, et cetera, et cetera. Perhaps because it is a story that primarily wants to be fun, Code Geass thumbs its nose at cleometrics and indeed at the marxist (small ‘m’) approach to history in general. It is not about mass movements but about the mistakes made by a few important people, whose actions affect vast numbers. It is a wildly entertaining tragedy. [The negative flip-side to this coin is that it's also a story told in an extremely aristocratic style. The ones who have been chosen are (wo)men of destiny, and the rest are pawns.]

In fact, by being about the mistakes of a few people, Code Geass lines neatly up with one of my few strongly-held beliefs: that most of us spend a lot of our time screwing up to some degree, and only figuring out where we went wrong afterwards. Who really knows what’s going on? The Emperor, and perhaps C.C. Who isn’t morally blinded? Euphemia, through the sheer power of naïveté, (ironically) Nunally and perhaps the Emperor, in a rejection-of-morals way. The rest of the cast stumble along, doing their best. Although Zero, on one side, and the Purists, on the other, would like to persuade you otherwise, the factions are too morally and (for that matter) racially muddled to be reduced to ‘good’ and ‘bad’; freedom fighters don’t have to be nice people, and collaborators aren’t necessarily villainous. Countries and movements are ‘made up of a large number of individuals, who all have their own thoughts, feelings, and emotions’.

So while it’s worth recognising the colonial slant of Code Geass - and I’ve a sad feeling that there’s a lot more to say than I have said - it’s unwise to try to reduce things down to a purely colonial interpretation, just as it’s unwise to try to argue that Lelouch is superior to Suzaku, or vice versa. It’s partly unwise because, as I pointed out above, Code Geass is anime, not a thesis, and fiction tends to be confused about what it wants to tell you, because it’s too busy trying to give you a good time. It’s also unwise because, beyond the limitations of being entertainment, this particular piece of entertainment consciously works hard to complicate things. This is Code Geass: whittle everything down to catchphrases and you’ll find you’re handling intellectual Sarin.

Acknowledgements

This is all Bateszi’s fault for asking difficult questions about Code Geass in the first place.

Well, it’s mostly his fault; the incoherency of the entry itself is because at the moment I’m revising for some exams with the focused attention of a man riding a unicycle slalom to escape from a swarm of wasps while eating peas with a cocktail stick and construing Pindar’s Odes. Into San-bloody-skrit.

Gratitude is due to iniksbane, whose own entry on the subject, linked above, examines Code Geass’s place in the corpus of Goro Taniguchi, whose previous projects have also said some rather pointed things about poverty and exploitation. It’s an analytical method which I (try to) avoid, so it’s good someone else is around to do it so well. And I should also thank Hige for pointing out how the British and the Japanese both seem to have a sense of nationality which is implicit rather than explicit.

In the absence of an appropriate image, I present an image of
the search for one.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin.

I was intrigued to hear that BBC Radio 4 would be touching on anime briefly this Sunday evening, although I was rather less intrigued by the fact that the coverage would be on Radio 4’s concession to children’s programming, Go4It. As you can probably tell from the way the title is spelt, Go4It is trapped by two incompatible facts: to attract its target audience it needs to be cool, but it’s on Radio 4, which is not cool.

(A courtesy for international readers.) Radio 4 is the BBC’s flagship radio station, and it’s mostly for members of the concerned middle class. It’s under an obligation to be Worthy, and its content is sometimes mistaken for high-brow radio. (The really high-brow stuff airs in Radio 3’s spoken word slots, because Radio 3 has such a small listenership that its controllers can put on whatever they feel like and no one will notice.) It also has a certain left-leaning slant to its comedy programming, because it’s very hard to find enough good right-wing comedians to fill a panel. (And you can’t mix the two: that would mean a fight, and while it might be interesting to hear Andy Zalzman holding someone down while Mark Thomas moved in with a chair, it wouldn’t be very funny.) But this is by-the-by.

Anyway, I never listen to Go4It for a number of reasons: I’m not a child, it’s rarely very interesting even for children and it airs directly after The Archers. Beyond those marks against the program, the air of concerned Worthiness that hangs about Radio 4 is so strong that even if I was a child I’d probably avoid Go4It like I’d avoid Char Aznable.

An artist’s impression of my reaction when The Archers theme plays on the radio. It’s not exactly a program for kidz who are hip and with-it.

But still, I thought it might be interesting to hear exactly what Radio 4 wanted to tell whoever does listen to Go4It about anime, so I tuned in. Turns out the entire program was devoted to Nipponophilia, with the anime item coming about a quarter of the way through. Impressively, the producers had Helen McCarthy on for an interview. McCarthy is very knowledgeable and - more important for this interview, perhaps - she’s able to adjust her diction over a very wide range, from her Barbican lectures to (as in this case) talking to children.

What was actually discussed? The children on the program mentioned Pokemon (one remarked that she enjoyed it ‘when I was little’), Yu-Gi-Oh! and Hamtaro as anime that they enjoyed. McCarthy mostly talked about three Miyazaki works (My Neighbour Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away). Normally I’d feel a little put-out if someone only talked about Miyazaki, good as he is, but it struck me that anime for children that’s available over here essentially breaks down into ’stuff like Pokemon‘ and ‘(some of) the works of Hayao Miyazaki’. If forced to choose, I suppose the latter is to be preferred, and I do wonder if the Miyazaki focus indicates a touch of Reithianism [Cultural Note: in brief, the principle that radio should give listeners what's good for them rather than what they want, named for Lord Reith, first Director-General of the BBC.]

Still, it’s a lot better than the blood’n'tentacles aura surrounding anime in Britain during the ’90s. I also noticed that McCarthy managed to succinctly distinguish between ‘anime’ and ‘manga’, which are sometimes conflated (posibly because of Manga Entertainment’s influence). And in the program’s opening quiz, one of the scores was just a little above nine thousand. Coincidence? I wonder.

Julian: GAR & Biggles - In Space!

Legend of the Galactic Heroes’s opening two episodes of space warfare made it clear how the series’ military confrontations look and broadly function: fleets line up and manoeuvre, space fighters are sent in and beam weapons are fired en masse. Interestingly, because both sides’ spaceships are submarine-shaped, they’re much easier to hit from the side than from head on, so whenever we see a fleet taken in the flank the results are literally explosive.

Given the show’s compelling heroes and the gripping political upheavals, I did not expect much variation on this theme. Writing about the show before I remarked on how gently the spaceships were introduced and established, so I gave up hoping for eye-popping spaceborne action. Trust the Legend, then, to blow me away with a multi-episode battle-stravaganza, only enhanced by the usual liberal helpings of human drama and political machination.

How awesome is the Death Star? Very awesome. I know that, you know that and indeed your mother knows that too (I asked her yesternight). The Legend (and the original novels were written in the early Eighties) takes the Death Star concept of a big, spherical fortress with a huge laser and - true to form - gives it its own unique spin (ah-ha). The sea of liquid metal as an outer shell allowing friendly ships to pass through and carrying floating gun turrets isn’t just a cool concept: it also makes for wierdly beautiful spheres of shining metal in space. That’s not the best thing, though.

Apparently, the Lord of Mordor sees all.

‘The best thing, and the thing that clearly distinguishes the Legend from Star Wars, is the very fact that there isn’t just one of these fortresses. They’re evidently unusual but not unknown, as the previous siege of Geiersberg during the Lipstadt conflict established (I now realise it was setting us up for this larger battle). Furthermore, as one of the Empire’s admirals points out, Schaft’s plan isn’t an out-of-the-blue technological development but a logical progression: with a fortress like Iserlohn in your way, it makes a kind of sense to bolt lots of engines onto your own fortress and try to fight fire with fire.

The Legend can go for episode after episode without any violence - on a human scale - at all, but when the axes are handed out things get quite bloody, quite fast. This is the mark of violence which is graphic yet not gratuitous. (Black Lagoon’s violence is both, while Seirei no Moribito’s is neither; Bleach is bloody but not especially graphic, yet extremely gratuitous - it’s heartily enjoyable sword-porn.) Or, to put it another way, the violence is bloody because real violence is really bloody, rather than because the animators wanted a sanguinary money-shot every episode. I said ‘quite bloody, quite fast’, because ’speed’ and ‘red’ are the two key words to describe the Legend’s martial encounters. The impact of speed imparts shock - and this is where it is similar to Seirei no Moribito - and so does the flow of blood.

Of course, a viewer such as myself is perfectly capable of enjoying the violence as though it is gratuitous.

This particular battle’s own close-combat encounter, between everyone’s favourite bred-from-the-genes-of-Chirico-Cuvie shock troops, the Rosenritter, and enemy boarders, is especially speedy because both sides are mounted on what can only be described as space-bikes. The sudden clashes between the two sides as they raced over the molten surface of Iserlohn reminded me of the way Malory describes (in a rather stylised way) tournaments - which is fitting, given that these are the Rosenritter. Then there’s the way the gouts of blood from the casualties freeze as they spill out into the cold, unfeeling vacuum of space. (I apologise; I must be feeling poetic today.) These guys always bring me the best violence. (Poetic and geekily referential.)

Moving up in scale somewhat, these fortresses’ presence in this battle also allows for some exciting fleet tactics, with fleets sallying in and out of Iserlohn and at one point chasing each other around its surface. The siege as a whole reminded me rather of the Battle of Alesia, although Kempf is certainly no Caesar, which may be why he loses. Iserlohn is Yang’s home, and this was really Yang’s battle: it’s sway was decided by his absence and then his presence. It was also his pupil Julian who made the crucial suggestion which lead to victory, and his ‘Guest Admiral’ Merkatz who executed Julian’s plan, vindicating Yang’s work as an adoptive father and his decision to trust the Imperial defector. And it was (yet) another telling comment on the series’ two governments that Yang was absent because he’d been hauled home by politicians who feared his power (perhaps rightly - I have yet to watch beyond Episode 34), while Reinhard was absent because he didn’t want to be associated with the campaign if it failed. Lohengramm’s advantage indeed.

Anime, in my experience, is not exactly bursting with massive battles. It could be the effort required to animate them, or the competing attractions of personal, heroic violence, or some reason beyond my comprehension. At any rate, I consequently treasure those moments - frequently when a long show is drawing to a close - that action on a vast scale erupts. Hence, in part, my affection for Char’s Counter Attack, which gets down at the very beginning to the kind of battles which usually appear only once per fifty episodes of Gundam (hooray for feature film budgets). Hence, too, my ecstatic reaction to the clash between Iserlohn and Geiersberg: it doesn’t get much better than this.

It’s a mixed-up muddled-up shook-up world.

Prompted by the intricacies of the Haruhi genderswap, the vicissitudes of Minami-ke’s Mako-cakes and Baka-Raptor’s recent defiant (and probably tongue-in-cheek) statement that ‘Kyon is not a girl‘. [Regarding the above image: yes, there's version without cropping and with panties. No, I'm not posting it.] ‘Once you’ve fap’d to a trap, can you never go back?’ Granted, this subject is hardly new (here’s one example of many others’ entries on it, and here’s another) but I’m not averse to picking over the bones at someone else’s banquet. I’m a student: food really is scarce.

‘Trap’ implies a relationship. Someone (the viewer) is at risk of falling into the trap. To be an effective trap, the character obviously has to look convincingly female, otherwise what you’ve got is more like a minefield with a big ‘WARNING: MINES’ sign in front of it: a deterrent. Quite what the negative consequences of being ‘caught’ are is somewhat unclear, but a hint can probably be found in the phrase ‘One is GAR for men and gay for traps’. Being caught supposedly induces some kind of anxiety about one’s sexual orientation. This being the ‘net, such anxiety is in most cases more a humourous than a serious matter.

What’s particularly interesting is the influence of what you might call ‘canon fact’ on fan reaction. I say canon fact because we’re handling fiction, but fans still think it matters whether or not a character is physically female. Take my initial picture as an example. Laura Rola is the female alter ego of Loran, the hero of ∀ Gundam; the picture depicts (as far as canon is concerned) a man dressed up as a woman. It’s a trap!

But for those who (poor souls) have never watched ∀ Gundam and are unfamiliar with its canon, it’s just a picture of a pretty girl in white stockings and a comely state of disarray. To riff on my Laertes, there’s no penis objectively inherent in that image. In fact, if the penis resides anywhere, it resides in the canon, which itself is something the viewer brings to the table. (You dirty viewer you, wondering around with a canon full of penises.) A good trap is visually indistinguishable from a woman, and in the world of the *boorus, the visual is all that there is.

Consider the case of Mako-cakes for a moment (and I’m sure others have realised this before me): within the Minami-ke canon (s)he’s treated by those characters who don’t know (s)he’s a trap exactly as though (s)he’s a girl. This is the pivot of a lot of the jokes surrounding Makoto, which have an extra coating of irony because it was his heterosexual lust for Haruka which Kana used to persuade him into crossdressing in the first place.

The situation becomes more complicated when we just have one image which appears to be a genderswap - as with the picture of a younger, female CHAR which I have used before. This image feeds off the <